Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Parks, Tim - Richard Eder (review date 16 October 1988)

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Richard Eder (review date 16 October 1988)

SOURCE: “Naked Tea,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 16, 1988, p. 3.

[In the following review, Eder offers a generally positive assessment of Home Thoughts, which he compares to the fiction of Kingsley Amis.]

“Evasion is paid for” is the moral of Tim Parks’ deceptively blithe novel about a gaggle of British expatriates living, scheming, gossiping and partner swapping in Verona.

In a sense, Home Thoughts is a second-generation Kingsley Amis novel. Its characters are seedy and comical; their intellectual poses mask a schoolboy greediness; their civility is a coat tattered by their own prickles.

In his prime—Lucky Jim and the novels that followed—Amis reflected the tensions and pretensions of postwar Britain, when such things as the welfare state, a certain theoretical idealism, trendy life styles and cultural liveliness were all in the air,...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Jo-Ann Goodwin (review date 17 October 1986)
   2. Michael J. Carroll (review date 24 January 1988)
   3. David Teagle (review date Summer 1988)
   4. Richard Eder (review date 16 October 1988)
   5. Peter Reading (review date 26 May–1 June 1989)
   6. Nicholas Clee (review date 30 August 1991)
   7. Tim Parks with Michele Field (interview date 6 July 1992)
   8. Christopher Bray (review date 4 September 1993)
   9. Nicholas Wroe (review date 10 September 1993)
   10. Frank Kermode (review date 4 November 1993)
   11. Jonathan Yardley (review date 10 July 1994)
   12. Jonathan Keates (review date 27 January 1995)
   13. Albert Read (review date 28 January 1995)
   14. Christopher Merrill (review date 24 March 1996)
   15. Nicholas Wroe (review date 19 July 1996)
   16. Keith Miller (review date 11 April 1997)
   17. Penelope Lively (review date 12 April 1997)
   18. John Derbyshire (review date 20 September 1998)
   19. Gabriele Annan (review date 5 November 1998)
   20. George Walden (review date 11 December 1998)
   21. Antony Rouse (review date 2 January 1999)
   22. Anita Brookner (review date 28 August 1999)
   23. Nicholas Fearn (review date 13 September 1999)
   24. Jenny Turner (review date 30 September 1999)
   25. D. J. Enright (review date 10 August 2000)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright