Volume 48, Number 20 · December 20, 2001
The Luck of Letty Fox
By Tim Parks
'I don't know what imagination is,' says Letty Fox, 'if not an unpruned, tangled kind of memory.' Though the claim comes early on in this long book, and is made what's more by one of the flightiest narrators fiction has ever produced, nevertheless the reader will immediately take it as confirmation of what he has already suspected: flagrantly unpruned and tangled beyond any unraveling, the six hundred pages of Christina Stead's Letty Fox: Her Luck are the seductive and savage reworking of an apparently inexhaustible memory.[1]
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