Feeling adrift in a haven

The Cost of Living

That such a self-assured example of the form should represent the writer’s first “serious” published work is quite astonishing; that it was the first of more than one hundred stories published by The New Yorker, including several of the 20 gathered here, does not surprise.

Madeline’s Birthday depicts the lives of Mrs Tracy upon whom 17-year-old Madeline has been foisted for the summer (“You are so much better able to cope.”) when her mother flees to Europe after her husband divorces her; a German refugee, Paul, one of her annual projects at the summer house (from which her husband perennially flees to the city); and Allie Tracey, nearly six, for whom adulthood is a strange country.