Volume 38, Number 6 · March 28, 1991
The Best of Times
By Diane Johnson
Possession
by A.S. Byatt
Random House, 555 pp., $22.95
Possession, A.S. Byatt's Booker Prize-winning novel, is brilliant, with all that 'brilliance' implies of terse cleverness, remarkable intelligence and learning, and hard, glittering surface, like a tea tray of rich, glazed fruit; it is also charming, with all that 'charm' implies of slightly illicit wiles, seductive ease, and pleasure. It is both a considerable feat of literary scholarship and a good read. Like a meticulous doll's house perfect down to the last detail, with tiny dolls' shoes covered in tiny seed pearls, and a tiny ship in a bottle on the mantel, it must have required immense cleverness and patience, in which the reader, apart from his enjoyment of the story, takes pleasure as at any feat of human ingenuity. Yet it succeeds finally not because of its artifice so much as because of its sincerity and the relevance of its preoccupations, in the way a Victorian novel does.
Review, 2252 words
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