[A] discrepancy between grand theme and limited accomplishment mars … [Embarkation, a novel] concerned with the painful intricacies of parent-child relationship … [concerned particularly] with the connections between imagination and love. (p. 294)

[Important is the] powerful image of the father-artist: one of the few forceful, self-seeking, energetic males around, in this era of the hero-as-helper. Joel Linthicum, builder of boats, already dead as the novel opens, survives, bigger than life, in the imaginations of his children, imaginations long since shaped and marred by him, the image of his effect always before us in the presence of the brain-damaged twenty-five-year-old Jamed. Joel is no hero, or a dreadfully ambiguous one. The novelist can imagine him, but cannot keep him going. Joel builds beautiful boats, sacrificing all human ties for their sake…. He drinks Scotch, fornicates, shouts Shakespeare. He dies. His wife has long since gone dead within, his idiot child still plays with sand. The brilliant daughter and actor-son find it impossible to achieve fulfillment. The son, Aaron, sees himself as a helper, a lover of the maimed and unsuccessful; the daughter cannot completely leave home.

Accurate characterization, powerful writing, ingenious invention—but no driving novelistic action: half an action, perhaps. Despite the great vitality of the central character, the novel lacks vitality of conception…. Joel Linthicum is compelled to his destruction, but his children's lives come to nothing in particular. Inconclusiveness, of course, is an up-to-date effect. But one may regret that it apparently has to generate so much inconclusive work. (p. 295)