Volume 25, Number 13 · August 17, 1978
Families
By Karl Miller
Picture Palace
by Paul Theroux
Houghton Mifflin, 359 pp., $9.95
The Family
by David Plante
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 301 pp., $8.95
These two novels are by American writers in the prime of their reputations who now live in England. Each novel is set in New England, and each is about a family, and about a family romance. Neither is proof of what has recently been asserted—that the English and American languages are diverging. In spite of the American vernacular they need to use, and in spite of the ethnic readings which each of them invites, neither is unmistakably the work of an American, rather than an Englishman: indeed, the ethos, or ethnos, of Theroux's novel could, in part, be called Anglo-American. David Plante's book is grave, tight, and deliberate. Paul Theroux's is loose and approximate, fast-moving, given over to impact and commotion and emotion. Never a dull moment.
Review, 3159 words
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