In this subtle, disturbing, beautifully-written novel [Green Water, Green Sky], Mavis Gallant writes of the disaster that results from a relationship founded on the mutual need and antagonism of a woman and her daughter, where love turns inward and festers, bringing about inevitably the disintegration of both characters. Imagery of decay and corruption convey to the reader a vivid sense of the destructive power of this ruthless love, the hollowness of its victims, and the symbolic wasteland that Europe becomes for them.

The mother and daughter are two homeless Americans drifting without purpose about Europe, belonging only to each other, their roots down in nothing but the barren soil of an effete family tradition, and no more solid ground under their feet than the shifting sands of their own fantasies…. The deterioration is complete when both women are reduced to the level of hallucination in the ordinarily unimaginative mind of a solid young cousin.

Miss Gallant has an astonishing talent for evoking a time and a place by the use of a single sharp detail: the parasols "askew in the hot wind" at the beach on the Lido, the sandy floors of the white-walled, shuttered room in Cannes. She has with remarkable skill conveyed a sense of the passage of time as it appears to human beings—events that are separated by years seen in juxtaposition, the past often more substantial than the present. Thus, time past, the green water and sky of Venice, can be resurrected by a single glass bead, and the present—a moment of unity on a bridge, for instance—looked at from some future point of observation.

The grim, tragic story is related with great technical ability and in a prose style marked by an economy rare in novels of this kind. Shrewdness of insight, exactness of imagery, an illuminating wit make it a novel that will be of interest to readers of serious fiction. The author's effects are the more startling for having been created by implication, the devices of foreshortening and suggestion used in poetry.