Contemporary Literary Criticism | Parks, Tim - David Teagle (review date Summer 1988)

David Teagle (review date Summer 1988)

SOURCE: A review of Loving Roger, in Antioch Review, Vol. 46, No. 3, Summer, 1988, pp. 390–91.

[In the following review, Teagle offers a positive assessment of Loving Roger.]

This second novel [Loving Roger] by British author Tim Parks opens nonchalantly with a domestic murder, and then winds backwards to examine with careful detail the events that led up to this rather passionless crime of passion. Anna, a typical, ordinary woman who works in a mediocre job as an anonymous secretary and lives with her parents in the shadow of her revered dead brother, falls in love with Roger, a gregarious co-worker with aspirations of being a playwright. The two begin a clandestine affair that is wracked with uncertainty and emotional turmoil on both sides and eventually leads to Anna's becoming pregnant. Having the baby only complicates their already fragile relationship, and a second pregnancy...

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