[Every one of the stories in People Are Fascinating] introduces a new collection of real and unromantic people. There is not much point in comparing Miss Benson with anyone else because her work is something new. She is brilliantly malicious, astonishingly economical as a writer and unusually guiltless of intellectual clichés, but that doesn't describe her work. Her characters are nearly all ordinary middle-class Americans, and one might complain that the range of emotions she deals with is narrow, but everybody in People Are Fascinating seems to have been drawn with the eye on the object. Miss Benson is a superb natural historian. She is also an artist with an austere sense of form and quoting her would be rather like cutting a square inch from a Daumier and exhibiting it as a sample of his work.

Frederick Laws, "New Novels: 'People Are Fascinating'," in The New...