Contemporary Literary Criticism | Parks, Tim - Michael J. Carroll (review date 24 January 1988)

Michael J. Carroll (review date 24 January 1988)

SOURCE: “The Love-Death of a Typesetter,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 24, 1988, p. 3.

[In the following review, Carroll offers a favorable assessment of Loving Roger.]

“Roger lay on my new blue rug in the corner by the television and the lamp that seemed like it always had the funny orange bubbles rising in it that he hated. But I went to work just as usual.”

Thus begins Loving Roger: Anna at work; Roger lying dead back in her bed-sitter. Anna will do no work today; she will tell us of her affair with Roger, her lover of two years, the father of her child.

In telling this story of love to the death, British author Tim Parks sets himself a number of obstacles: The climax is revealed in the first few pages. The narrator is a vacuous 20-year-old secretary whose thoughts and expressions derive from television and romantic fiction. The narrator does not...

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