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The author's first novel, Happy Valley, was an ironical picture of a community in reverse, stagnant and defeated. Here, narrowing the focus to three people, a mother, son and daughter, is an equally penetrating, but equally, limited study. White writes supremely, he is detached, precise, barbed, sensitized to the failures of the modern world; he is an observer and a subtle recorder. In his story, the son, a dilettante writer, withdrawn from the world, represents the dead; the daughter, overcoming her emotional sterility in her thirties, and defying the strictures of her class, has an affair with a carpenter, and in finding a positive credo, represents the living. And the mother, hovering between the two, escapes meaningless gestures of a frustrated life, by finding a certain elemental vitality in the fleeting passion for a vulgarian. Not a book for many; but the man can write. (Kirkus Reviews)
