Stories, novels, and the sadness of Stafford's Manhattan stories

Although the first and possibly the best-known of Jean Stafford's stories in Collected Stories (1969). Sundays the Children Are Bored, picks up on one of her key themes - woman from the West or from a small-town background feels intellectually and culturally inferior to her new social setting - Europe, NE, or NYC - not all of the stories are on this theme. Beatrice Trueblood's Story - one of the more interesting to me because of its Newport setting - is about woman (and men) of the same rarefied social set (for the most part) who make terrible decisions in marriage; the eponymous Beatrice suddenly goes deaf, in a symbolic and, her friends suspect, psychosomatic way to "tune out" and end a potential disastrous engagement. Other stories involve street life - one piece about a woman with only a few coins in pocket wrestling w/ whether to donate in the church or to a drunkard/beggar; another - w/ the cool title I Love Someone (spied on a bit of graffiti - involves a woman who witnesses a brutal street fight from her window. One of the amusing sidelights of reading these fine stories with the detailed and elegant diction - out of fashion today, since the passing of Updike I'd say - is how we note the changes in neighborhood values: Her description of a 70s East Side apartment and another apartment on 16th and 6th as marginal, almost slum locales, today seems hilarious, ludicrous. Cops and Robbers is among her most powerful indictments of marriage, particular among the well-to-do, as we see an estranged husband and wife at war with their youngest child the hostage. Stafford is never a cheerful writer, but her Manhattan stores are especially dark; it's actually surprising how few of her stories are set in NYC, given that she lived in Manhattan during much, even most, of her working life. Stories tend to be a genre in which writers examine their earliest memories and the formative years of their lives; novels dwell more in the present.