[Below, Stone criticizes Blackwood's plot and character development in Corrigan.]

Caroline Blackwood tends to see human relationships as sick jokes. Her novels are variations on The Defiant Ones, full of contrary types unhappily shackled together: a philandering rogue and his pathologically passive wife; a secretly raging woman and her belligerent, obese stepdaughter; a watchful 14-year-old and her rich, miserly great-grandmother, a gargoyle who flourishes the best silver for a dinner of canned spaghetti. Along with a number of other British writers—Beryl Bainbridge, Bernice Rubens, and Emma Tennant come to mind—Blackwood reaps startling insights by telling gothic stories (about murders, closeted skeletons, false identities) using a psychologically probing voice.

The technique is in place in Corrigan, her latest novel. Devina Blunt, the Colonel's widow, is wasting to a frizzle of grief in a remote Wiltshire village. Every day, she walks to the cemetery and places expensive bouquets from a Salisbury florist on her husband's grave. In the past, Devina grew her own flowers and whipped things up to eat; now she subsists on air. She's never been able to stomach the cooking of her house-keeper, Mrs. Murphy, a woman who considers pan grease sauce for any dish. Into this forlorn life, Corrigan hurtles his handsome, wheelchair-bound 35-year-old body. He's collecting contributions for a hospital, he says, in his high-flown, hysterical style, and within minutes, Devina is offering him the Colonel's best claret. Within weeks, he's ensconced in her pretty period house, and the two are sharing afternoon champagne and goose liver pâté. Within months, Devina has bought the surrounding farmland, started trucking produce to the hospital, purchased warehouses full of antique furniture, begun to paint, had a London gallery show, and sold all her work.

Meanwhile, Devina's daughter, Nadine, discovers that she loathes her journalist husband, madly envies her mother, and finds savage ill will toward Corrigan. All is wittily confessed to best-friend Sabrina, a luminous model with a predilection for fragile men. "If you can't bear to speak to someone on the telephone … I don't really see that you can start asking them for money," Nadine says, explaining why she can't solicit aid from Devina. Contemplating her smug husband, she wonders whether his tallness is the cause of his "lack of normal human response." She suspects he doesn't have "a sufficient supply of blood in his long body for the necessary amount to reach his brain." Sabrina's current companion is Coco, an Algerian homosexual who claims to be Italian. Visiting him in the hospital after one of his suicide attempts, she finds him woefully transformed: "His whole sexuality seemed to have been dried out along with the drugs to which he'd been addicted…. She felt that he had all the limpness of the despondent-looking ducks that she'd seen hanging upside-down in the windows of cheap Chinese restaurants."

Alas, such stylish observations are in far shorter supply here than in Blackwood's previous books. For all the outlandishness of the Wiltshire ménage and the rueful satire of London neurotics, this novel registers as a dutifully completed exercise. Most of the chapters are devoted to Devina, Corrigan, and Mrs. Murphy—Dickensian types composed entirely of quirks and pet phrases. They soon become tiresome; Devina's change is described rather than dramatized, and the plot isn't surprising either. The intended "mystery" of Corrigan is solvable in the first pages. Blackwood devised these cartoons, it seems, only to lose interest in them for having no inner lives.

Ambivalent Nadine is the most realized character, but the book feels lopsided with her as the emotional center, because she's relatively peripheral. There's another problem too: Nadine is one of Blackwood's inert, seething doormats, a creature she's limned many times. The author tries to evoke our sympathy by making Nadine's husband and twin sons selfish monsters, but the tactic backfires—Nadine seems responsible for choosing and raising despicable males. She pities herself with too much pleasure for us to care about her fate. Sabrina, alone, is both sufficiently knowing and knowable to arouse interest—but she's an even more marginal character than Nadine. This is a sign, if ever there was one, of a writer's fatigue with her creation—an exhaustion, I hope, which means that Blackwood is gathering energy for a book that will pique her imagination.