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had been sooty fluff, came in stiff and rusty black; his nose grew aristocratically long, and his clever, pointed ears stood at attention. He was all bronzy, lustrous black except for an Elizabethan ruff of white and a tip of white at the end of his perky tail…He escorted Daisy and me to school in the morning, laughing interiorly out of the enormous pleasure of his life.
    In “An Influx of Poets,” Cora Savage observes her pet cat Pretty Baby, whose blissful pride in motherhood is an ironic, in time bitterly ironic expression of the vulnerability of Cora’s emotional state:
    [The kittens] were still blind and [Pretty Baby] was still proud, cosseting them with her milk and her bright, abrasive tongue and the constant purr into which, now and then, she interjected a little yelp of self-esteem. When she nestled down, relaxed among her produce, I knelt and strongly ran the knuckle of my thumb down the black stripes that began just above her nose and terminated in the wider, blacker bands around her neck, and then I left her to her rapturous business of grooming her kittens, nursing in their blindness and their sleep.
    A gambling casino in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium, a grubby downscale version of Monte Carlo, nonetheless exerts an almost preternatural spell on a young woman named Abby in “The Children’s Game” who succumbs to the hypnotic frenzy of roulette:
    She was still ahead when the wheel was spun for the last time; and when everything was finished she was giddy as she struggled out of her cocoon-like trance. The croupiers’ fatigue humanized them; they rubbed their eyes and stretched their legs and their agile hands went damp. Abby was a little dashed and melancholy, let down and drained; she was, even though she had won, inconsolable because now the table, stripped of its seduction, was only a table. And the croupiers were only exhausted workingmen going to bed.
    So appalled is Abby by the “monstrous” Belgian town, her appalled fascination inspires Stafford to a tour de force of description as charged with kinetic energy as Dickens’s most animated city scenes:
    [Knokke-le-Zoute] possessed houses that looked like buses threatening to run them down and houses that looked like faces with bulbous noses and brutish eyes…The principal building material seemed to be cobblestones, but they discovered a number of houses that appeared to be made of cast iron. In gardens there were topiary trees in the shape of Morris chairs and some that seemed to represent washing machines. The hotels along the sea were bedizened with every whimsy on earth, with derby-shaped domes and kidney-shaped balconies, with crenellations that looked like vertebrae and machicolations that looked like teeth, with turrets, bow-windows, dormers and gables, with fenestrations hemstitched in brick or bordered with granite point lace. Some of the chimneys were like church steeples and some were like Happy Hooligan’s hat. The cabanas, in the hot, dark haze, appeared to be public telephone booths. Even the flowers dissembled and the hydrangeas, looked like utensils that belonged in the kitchen…The plazas were treeless plains of concrete where big babies sunned…. There was an enormous smell of fish.
    And Stafford’s characters are a wonderfully motley lot, out-sized and garrulous as cartoon bullies, meekly repressed and virginal as the hapless observers in Henry James; adolescent girls and women who struggle to define themselves against their adversaries, and deeply conflicted, self-lacerating women who seem to have succumbed to sexist stereotypes despite their high intelligence. Here, as intelligent as any of Stafford’s characters, yet utterly miserable, is Ramona Dunn of “The Echoand the Nemesis,” an American graduate student who has come to post-war Heidelberg to study philology:
    Ramona Dunn was fat to the point of parody. Her obesity fitted her badly, like extra clothing put on