Adams, Alice - Dean Flower (essay date 1979)
Dean Flower (essay date 1979)
SOURCE: "Picking Up the Pieces," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XXXII, No. 2, Summer, 1979, pp. 293-307.
[In the following excerpt, Flower provides a mixed assessment of Beautiful Girl.]
[Adams] has been represented in every O. Henry Award collection for the last eight years, and her three novels (most recently, Listening to Billie last year) have received much praise, but to my mind her fiction fails—despite its numerous attractions—to offer a sufficiently serious criticism of the worlds she knows so well. Adams moves easily from Chapel Hill to New England to San Francisco, usually in the society of the rich: "Ardis Bascomb," the title story begins, "the tobacco heiress, who twenty years ago was a North Carolina beauty queen, is now sitting in the kitchen of her San Francisco house, getting drunk."
Adam's favorite strategy is to place an interesting woman, frequently a beautiful one marred by...
[The entire page is 768 words long]
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