[In] Children Is All, Purdy displays once more the talents, quirks and compulsions that have, in the few short years be has been publishing, moved his readers to almost equal extravagance of praise and exasperation.

What is best in this volume is unmistakably Purdy. Perhaps the same is true of what is worst in it, but that is at least a less obvious conclusion. "Daddy Wolf," for instance, the first story in the collection, is a totally successful tour de force—a semihysterical monologue by a Negro whose wife and child have abandoned him and their rat-infested tenement flat Dialogue has always been a Purdy strength, and in "Daddy Wolf" the speech is exactly right. It is funny, sad, realistic and poetic, conveying a story that slides imperceptibly from the closely observed commonplace to the hallucinatory and symbolic.

In Purdy's stories, of course, the hallucinatory and symbolic are...