[In the following excerpt, Kiely commends Calisher's prose in Textures of Life, though finds fault in her generalizations about women.]

To read the newly published novels of Hortense Calisher and Iris Murdoch one after the other is a salutary and educational experience for anyone who tends to place contemporary female novelists together in the same hazy category. There are obvious attributes that women writers, these two included, are likely to have in common; they prefer to see a dramatic situation through the eyes of a heroine rather than a hero, and their feminine characters are deftly and unsentimentally—Lord, how unsentimentally—depicted; they have a fondness for precise detail, and their subject, no matter how you view it, is love.

Beyond that, these two authors defy comparison with each other. If Hortense Calisher’s Textures of Life reminds us now and then of Virginia Woolf or Elizabeth Bowen, Iris Murdoch’s The Unicorn conjures up the ghosts of Ann Radcliffe and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. They are, in other words, about as far apart as you can get—as practitioners of fiction in our language.

Textures of Life is Miss Calisher’s second novel. Her first was False Entry, and she has also published two fine collections of short stories, In the Absence of Angels and, more recently, Tale for the Mirror. Miss Calisher’s previous work has accustomed us to expect a delicacy of expression and a subtle treatment of the psychology involved in even commonplace events. In this respect, Textures of Life is no disappointment. In fact, it is a tribute to Miss Calisher’s real skill as a craftsman that she can turn a willful and unpleasant heroine, her wraithlike husband, and the dreary lofts they insist on living in, into interesting and occasionally compelling fiction.

The novel opens with the wedding reception of Elizabeth Jacobson, would-be sculptress, to David Pagani, photographer, and a young man of almost superhuman patience. Both are from middle-class families, both are half-Jewish, and both have widowed parents. In fact, the warmest and most moving section of the book has to do with the relationship between Elizabeth’s mother and David’s ailing Italian father. But the center of the novel is really Elizabeth and her obsessive need to rebel against the petit-bourgeois ways of her mother who loves domestic comfort and “nice things.” Everything and everyone, including her young husband, is ground under by Elizabeth’s single-minded intention, even after the mother has gone off to California, to avoid doing things “her way.” When a daughter is born to the young Paganis (the significance of the name should not be overlooked) Elizabeth is forced, after a series of domestic crises, to realize that she must suffer the same agonies over her child that her own mother suffered—and receive for her troubles a similar hostility.

Miss Calisher’s conclusion is not despairing but resigned and, from at least one man’s point of view, depressing. Women, she seems again and again to be telling us, are just that way. And so is life. A kind of biological determinism accounts for most of the things people spend years trying to understand. So Elizabeth and her mother are types, perhaps even archetypes, of mothers and daughters everywhere and always. But it is precisely against the universality of this suggestion that the mind rebels. Miss Calisher is good—sometimes superb—at New York and lofts and dialogues between pregnant women, but she falters when she generalizes. Elizabeth Pagani is not a modern Everywoman. She’s too pinched, too narrow even for this petty century. …