'No man knows what evil lurks in the secret heart of men. But the Shadow Knows.' So I am told by an American friend, a Valentine Dyall-like voice informed the Americans before every episode of a radio serial. The Shadow was a mastermind, a super-detective, anonymous, ubiquitous. The claim of the mystery-voice is, in itself, ambiguous. So, I take it, is Diane Johnson's novel, which is a cunning cross between the intensely articulate plaint of the under-extended intelligent woman and a conventional mystery, shading into a psychological horror-story….

N. [the narrator], for all her sympathy with, and intermittent admiration of, herself, is a chilly and rebarbative creature. A good feminist might say she was a typical product of a way of life she is feebly trying to rebut. Horrified by housework, blinded by smeary fingers of entirely uncharacterised children on her glasses, she takes to transformational grammar, about which she says nothing, and adultery, about which she says a lot. Her moments of vigour are those of the unliberated woman—bodily narcississm, a manipulative, masochistic helplessness before lover and reader….

[N.'s] imagination can be seen as a self-referring, self-nourished, proliferating fantasy. All the other people in the book are two dimensional, mediated by her obsessive, self-castigating, self-justifying vision. The plot is in several ways her construct…. Psychoanalysed Bess claims glibly that the perils of the outer world are nothing compared to the dark abysses of the mind, 'strange powers which drive you into the arms of murderers'….

Here, the dark American Gothic takes over. References are made to the Heart of Darkness. The blacks are at home in the world of Gothic and that of reality…. [N. undergoes] an easy, dream-like rape, in keeping with her fantasy-world of passion and violence; and claims, as a result, to have become 'a shadow, a creature of the dark', to have joined 'the spiritually sly'. Morality, as in so many American novels, slides into a dream of evil which underlies it.

Diane Johnson's account of the thoughts and deeds of her characters [in "Lying Low"] … is sensitive and subtle, but her descriptions of young folk sneaking around with noxious homemade "jelly and jam" (obviously explosives) are not, and the violent turn of events seems an awkward attempt to endow a cerebral narrative with the action of a thriller. (pp. 249-50)

The New Yorker (© 1978 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), November 13, 1978.