Gibbons, Kaye (Vol. 145) - Kate Kellaway (review date 2 June 1996)
Kate Kellaway (review date 2 June 1996)
SOURCE: A review of Sights Unseen, in London Observer, June 2, 1996, p. 16.
[In the following review, Kellaway complains that there is not enough material in Gibbons's Sights Unseen to sustain an entire novel.]
Kaye Gibbons is a young American writer and [Sights Unseen] is her fifth book. It is a portrait of a manic depressive mother, by her daughter, and it reads like autobiography.
Madness may be a dramatic subject for fiction but it can also be a closed door, so that although the focus of this novel is on Maggie Barnes and the details of her breakdowns, she stays foreign, unknowable to her daughter and to the reader. There is a sense that if it were possible to climb into the madness more, to let us experience something of what Maggie Barnes was going through or to attempt to understand her psyche, the novel would have more depth. As it is, Maggie seems like a pastel...
[The entire page is 394 words long]
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