[In the following excerpt, Milton asserts that Lurie employs clever technique in The Truth about Lorin Jones by writing a novel about writing but finds shortcomings in the novel's narrow focus and feminist concerns.]

In any review of the year's fiction what the reviewer thinks about the books he chooses is certainly less important than what books he chooses to think about. I arbitrarily excluded short stories and translations from this piece—on the grounds that these would make a sufficiently complicated task impossible. But once my focus was narrowed to novels written in English and published in this country during 1988, once I was going about the business of making my selection in earnest, I realized my choices may need some defense.

For these ten books, the limit to which a review will stretch, reveal shamefully that my interest lies much less in what people are writing than in what they are reading. Where are the small press books? The post-modernist no longer avant-garde? The thousands of books untouched by The New York Times Book Review? This review is perhaps just where they belong, but they have been usurped here, as everywhere else, by the popular, literate novels you are likely to find among the Book-of-the-Month-Club alternate selections and in the bookshelves built in hallways by people who keep their volumes of history and philosophy alphabetized and in chronological order in their studies. The truth is that I want to get away from the individual quirks and instant inspirations, the time warp of rejections, delays, revisions, which govern the creation and publication of the written word. The read word is more reliable: you can tell from it here and now what the state of the culture is.

So avoiding the edges of creativity I have stayed close to the center of things. If tomorrow's fiction is incubating today on some recondite fringe, waiting to spring to intellectual life, I have probably passed by it unseeing. What I must assume is that for any foreseeable future the health and survival of the novel will depend on that solid, well-travelled, well-respected highroad of the obvious exemplified here by the four American novels where I began my reading: At Risk by Alice Hoffman, Second Chances by Alice Adams, John Updike's S, and Alison Lurie's The Truth about Lorin Jones.

Technically three of these are good novels, and two of them I would count as very good novels indeed. But they share a single vitiating characteristic: a fear of plunging too far into the depths keeps them relentlessly shorebound. Reading them, one after the other, I began to feel beached like some sea creature, choking myself on decompression and a surfeit of surfaces.

Not, you understand, that I demand profundity in all my fiction. Barbara Pym and Kingsley Amis and Robertson Davies would be the first to get packed in my desert island bookbag while Solzhenitsyn might be left at home. I like to frolic carefree in the literary waves. But the problem with frolicking is that, in order to create the sort of waves useful for frolicking in, you need to start at a pretty impressive depth from which to develop them. A great many of the most rewarding pieces of fiction may aim for nothing more than playfulness, with no pretensions of imparting deep wisdom; but if they stay in the mind they were probably conceived a few fathoms down, and born below the accustomed surface we live on. Their voices have echoes and counterechoes and their jeu d'esprit has undertones which call out to things more monumental. …

Like Updike, Alison Lurie has won a Pulitzer Prize—for her last novel, Foreign Affairs—and, like his, her genius is cleverness. In The Truth about Lorin Jones she is writing one of those books about writing a book which allows for several voices, interesting dramatic techniques, and the elegant paradox of presenting different accounts of the same event. In this case she has also recreated a pleasantly varied, cutting-edge segment of contemporary society to conduct us through on her literary ramble.

The novel's main point of view is that of Polly Alter, failed artist and art historian by default. She is about to write a biography of Lorin Jones, a woman Polly has never met, since she died mysteriously in 1978, the year before Polly curated a show of her work. Recently divorced, mother of a young son who is off visiting his father, Polly is lonely and muddled, and she abjectly identifies with a subject she sees as embodying the puzzle she expects her biography to solve: how do men exploit women and keep them from the fame and the success they deserve?

The novel follows Polly's increasingly Byzantine life—as her son decides to stay with his father; as her sweetly lesbian friend, Jeanne, unhappy in love, moves in and takes over her life; as her apartment is invaded and her self-esteem is demolished. Scenes from Polly's disintegrating world alternate with transcripts of her interviews with Lorin's friends and relations: dealer, husband, friend, half-brother, stepmother, niece, teacher, collector. It is these interviews which are particularly sharp, gems of short fiction in different voices reflecting the central puzzle of a difficult and complex woman and the contradictory values of an unkind and complex world. The interviewed subjects—several of whom have, like Lorin herself, appeared at other ages in other Lurie novels—are finely drawn, and as the jigsaw of their evidence comes together Lorin, too, emerges in a compelling, complex portrait of a driven artist betrayed by her fragile human psychology.

There is something almost Victorian in the book's tight arrangement of misplaced affections and abandonments: people fall in love with the wrong generation, misconstrue each other's motives, spurn each other for mistaken causes, misidentify each other and themselves. But though these various confusions and the interweaving of past family patterns into present behavior are beautifully worked out, Polly's story, the central core of the novel, is yawningly banal. Polly herself is so eagerly passive, leaping so easily to fashionably biased conclusions, falling into Jeanne's bed, agreeing with everyone and blaming it all on men, that she becomes an irritant. We know, before she even starts her investigation, that her wishful view of Lorin's victimized life is doomed.

One longs for the good old days before feminism and this sort of counter-feminism, days when Jane Eyre and Little Dorrit and Elizabeth Bennet, knowing no better, negotiated the dangerous currents between personal desire and social expectation with a great deal more courage and imagination than anything offered here.

But Polly is not alone in falling halfway between the tedious and the despicable. Whether by design or through the technical inadequacy of the writing the characters of each of these four novels are all lilliputians, smaller and less courageous in their engagements with life than we might expect ourselves to be. At Risk almost gives us portraits which are at least life-size, but even here the characters who come closest to the random generosity of life, like the gay AIDS victim and Amanda's grandparents, are kept in the background. Smallness reigns triumphant.

It is as though the ideal of American fiction had remained the same since Stephen Crane founded the Great American Realist Tradition, or at least since Nathaniel West, looking through the wrong end of his moral telescope, worked in miniature to impale his human specimens and design the exquisite sharpness of his landscapes: the irony, since then, has dissipated, but the ironic scale, it seems, remains.