people in glass houses

People in Glass Houses by Shirley Hazzard (King Penguin, 1988)

A slight and underwhelming collection of short stories based upon Hazzard’s experience working at the United Nations.  Each of the eight stories focuses on a different person or group of people working at the “Organization,” which is clearly modeled on the U.N.  Hazzard’s approach is mostly satirical, revealing the ineffectual bureaucracy and endemic pettiness of everyone working at the Organization.  Some of the stories are more developed narratively than others, but most are slight and repeat the same themes and notes.  Disappointing and a failure as far as engaging fiction is concerned, but Hazzard writes with her customary wit and elegance, and her depiction of character is, as always, first-rate.

Some of the characters do reoccur, and one supposes that Hazzard might have developed the material more ambitiously and fashioned a clever, biting, comic novel out of this.  But that would probably have only been marginally more successful.