Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Gibbons, Kaye (Vol. 88) - Roz Kavaney (review date 15 September 1989)

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Roz Kavaney (review date 15 September 1989)

SOURCE: "Making Themselves Over," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4511, September 15, 1989, p. 998.

[In the following excerpt, Kavaney positively reviews A Virtuous Woman.]

Kaye Gibbons's second novel, A Virtuous Woman, has the simplicity of a good Country-and-Western song; where her first, Ellen Foster, had all the artifice in the world going for its portrait of a child whose naiveté masks a growing sense of the world's real complexity, here she shows us two adults for whom extremity has revealed the bare bones of life. Ruby, a name chosen because Solomon informs us that the price of the virtuous woman is above it, is in alternate chapters dying of lung cancer and going over her life; in the other chapters, after her death, Jack, her husband, is busy mourning her and a life which always turned in detail to disappointment, whatever the consolation she brought him...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Andrew Rosenheim (review date 25 November 1988)
   2. Padgett Powell (review date 30 April 1989)
   3. Deanna D'Errico (review date Summer 1989)
   4. Marilyn Chandler (review date July 1989)
   5. Roz Kavaney (review date 15 September 1989)
   6. Rhoda Koenig (review date 1 April 1991)
   7. Ralph C. Wood (essay date 23-30 September 1992)
   8. Stephen McCauley (review date 11 April 1993)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright