[Rosellen Brown] has powers of phrasing, of insight into feeling, of evocation; she has learning and she is, novelistically, ambitious, setting—and bringing off—a difficult section of her novel in a pre-Nazi Germany that she cannot have known firsthand but has to have grasped wholly through imagination and intelligent reading. Rosellen Brown has almost everything a novelist should have except, in The Autobiography of My Mother, a real story. Her extremely intelligent book might more accurately have been entitled Two Characters in Search of a Novel.

The two characters, a mother and a daughter, are each remarkable. An old world figure, the mother resembles someone not altogether unlike the late Hannah Arendt, though in a more activist strain…. European, cerebral, with a mind honed to cut fine distinctions, thinking in an English that makes the requirements of precision that only a well-educated foreigner can bring to the language, she is a most fascinating construction…. As for the daughter, she is very near to a human disaster. A floater out on the sea called counter-culture, she has lived in hippy squalor, sleeping round, picking up then dropping one or another interest, eventually becoming a professional incompetent, a title which she earns indisputably by having a child out of wedlock by a Trotskyist whose fingers smell of cat food. (A nice touch, that last.) Such are Miss Brown's two characters, mother and daughter—not exactly a page out of the Christmas J. C. Penney Catalogue.

The setting is claustral, as perhaps it should be for female combat; but more than claustral, it is a bit menacing, as the upper-west side of Manhattan can often be. The novel proper begins with the daughter showing up at her mother's legal office with her child. No men of any moment appear in the book. The two women know each other too well, which doesn't make conversation between them any easier; this and the fact that neither is what the other had in mind for a mother or daughter. Many valuable things about women—also about Woman—get said in Miss Brown's pages; and if at times one is inclined to label this a "feminist" novel—an insulting label—it is finally better than that. Yet for all her talent Miss Brown's novel wants a sense of direction. Hers is a book that offers the object lesson that subtle portraiture, keen psychological insight, and splendid writing—rare and blessed things though they are in themselves—are not sufficient to produce a novel of the first class. It is only at the very end of The Autobiography of My Mother that, through a twist with a fatal air of contrivance to it, something like a plot emerges. The effect is rather like hearing a joke splendid in the telling capped by a weak punch-line. Still, her novel does make one indisputable point, and this is that Rosellen Brown is a novelist worth reading. (pp. 599-600)