[After "Jill" and "A Girl in Winter," Larkin's fiction] stopped dead. As Larkin has ruefully explained, he waited for more fiction to come—but it never did.

Why? Well, the two novels we have provide what clues there are. In this respect "Jill" (1946) is the less significant book. It is less significant because anyone could have written it—or, to put the point more exactly, it needn't have been written by Philip Larkin. Blending fantasy and self-absorption in the usual first-novel style, it recounts the gaucheries of a furtive, owlish working-class boy during his first term at Oxford: the hero's queasy sense of social inferiority, his emulation of a dissolute roommate, and his own graceless erotic yearnings combine to bring about his tragicomic humiliation. "Jill" is a funny, confused, likable and quite undisconcerting book.

"A Girl in Winter," published in England in 1947, is something else again: it is Larkinesque. At first it looks like a similar novel—indeed, the same novel, except that it is told from the woman's point of view. (p. 2)

It is a far more enigmatic book than "Jill"; and it is also, somehow, far less of a novel. Haltingly paced and erratically written, "Jill" is at least integrally thought out—its minor characters are assimilated, its questions resolved, its themes dispatched. In "A Girl in Winter" the fictional accessories are no more than listless toys in the glare of the heroine's solipsism. The minor figures are, strictly, mere walk-ons, liable to be shrugged off as soon as they cease to stimulate Katherine's introspection; and the moral appositions of the novel loom and flicker with similar caprice. But these aren't criticisms—they are clues. The answer is, of course, that Larkin is already becoming less of a novelist, and more of a poet.

The process of distillation, of reduction to essences, shows itself in a number of ways, some of them poignant, some of them effortful. Larkin is prepared, for instance, to write an impossibly flat sentence ("It was very solacing to be alone"; "The truth was, she had not been facing facts") if an abrupt mood-swing requires it. Then, too, he will fasten consecutive scenes on some tritely effusive image—there's a symbolic snail, a flock of symbolic pigeons, even a symbolic frog—and almost every other chapter fades out in a kind of neon wistfulness: "She dropped the dead flowers into the wastepaper basket," and the like. Correspondingly, though, "A Girl in Winter" gives us a unique insight into the origins of a remarkable talent. Here we see Larkin getting ready to use his special genius: his ability to make landscape and townscape answer to human emotion. The snow, the shopfronts, the rivers, the blacked-out streets—each gives its own expression to the intense seclusion at the heart of the book.

This is the larval Larkin, displayed more transparently here than in even his earliest verse. If you turn to "The North Ship" (1945) for some lines appropriate to "A Girl in Winter," you will find only a remote evocation:

     To pull the curtains back
     And see the clouds flying—
     How strange it is
     For the heart to be loveless, and as cold as these.

If you turn to "High Windows" (1974), however, you will find the essence of the same story, retold in poem after poem:

    The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
    Loosely as cannon-smoke …
    Is a reminder of the strength and pain
    Of being young; that it can't come again,
    But is for others undiminished somewhere.
                                        (pp. 2, 16-17)

Martin Amis, in The New York Times Book Review (© 1976 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), December 26, 1976.