It's sometimes easy to forget that good writing is not necessarily brilliant on the surface. There are talented novelists who eschew local flourishes in favour of a tonal evenness which they believe better serves the purposes of structure, characterisation and plot. Their prose seeks to be transparent rather than dazzling. If one could plot writers on a continuum which measured the extent to which a prose style forces its brilliance on our attention, the four novelists here under review would be clustered towards the self-effacing side of the spectrum, with colleagues such as Burgess, Nabokov and Amis fils huddling together for warmth at the far end.

LRB 24 May 1990 | PDF Download