[In the following review of Casualties of Peace, Dienstag asserts that O'Brien's "old-fashioned" and clichéd structuring of her novel destroys the effectiveness of her "extraordinary style."]

Willa McCord is dreaming. She is walking down a dark street toward her house when a car with two men in it stops flush beside her. One of the men asks the way to a theater. She gives a quick answer, a lie. They drive off. She rushes to her door, but can't find it. The men return. It is now daylight, and there are witnesses, but it doesn't seem to matter. The men get out of the car, closing in for the kill.

So begins Casualties of Peace, a novel about the violence of ordinary life and the victims of that violence, sometimes innocent strangers, sometimes not. Willa McCord is one of those victims—yet this is not a murder story in the conventional sense. It is about two women, Willa and her resident housekeeper Patsy, their love affairs, disparate lives and desires, and the chance crossing of their paths which leads to the kind of bizarre tragedy one reads about in the tabloids.

Though Patsy and Willa experience extremes of brutality and sex, in other respects they are exact opposites. Willa, a sculptor of glass figures, is neurotic, frail, and fleeing from the after effects of marriage to an impotent Svengali. A virgin, "though tampered with," she is terrified by sex. Patsy, on the other hand, is a Molly Bloom—simple, sensual, unhappily wed but thigh-high in a torrid affair. She has, in fact, determined to leave her husband—and, when we first meet her, she is packing her things and writing her crude goodby note.

Inexplicably, while doing a few last-minute chores, she blurts out her plans to Willa, who persuades her to put off her departure and inform her unsuspecting husband of what is about to happen. Willa's meddling sets off a deadly chain of events it would be unfair to reveal here. When Patsy finally escapes, it is too late.

Though Casualties of Peace is a grim tale, the book itself is anything but depressing. Edna O'Brien has an extraordinary style. The novel pulsates with her racy, exuberant, nervous prose, a prose that often achieves the intensity of a unique shorthand. Her robust humor dependably infringes upon an acute Catholic sense of sin; and along with the best female writers of our age, she is unblushingly candid about her own sex. Why, then, doesn't it all add up?

What is most contradictory in Miss O'Brien's fiction is her utterly modern voice echoing in an old-fashioned house. In the present book, this conflict between style and structure, between what she is saying and the techniques she uses to convey it, is especially damaging. As in an earlier novel, August Is a Wicked Month, one is puzzled to find an uninhibited view of life coupled with the tidy and somewhat unreal form of the well-made novel, with all the small details falling into place, working up to tragic inevitabilities the way they might in a detective story.

In Casualties of Peace, for example, the opening scene of a dream of murder neatly mirrors the closing one (in terms of plot) of an actual murder. This is an irritatingly clichéd device for framing a novel, the slick stuff of which melodrama is made. It has nothing to do with the noncommittal tone of the rest of the book, or with the disorder and unresolved quality of modern life of which the author is very much aware. Such a device (and others sprinkled throughout the story) only diminishes the novel's impact.

One feels a large and important work is within Miss O'Brien's grasp. Casualties of Peace, unfortunately, is not that work.