Diane Johnson L'Affaire New York: Dutton, 2003. Pp. 340. CAN $37.50 If you have not yet read the first two novels in Diane Johnson's AngloFrench trilogy, Le Divorce (1997) and Le Mariage (2000), do so at your earliest opportunity. But you need...

PW: L'Affaire [reviewed on p. 57] is a natural successor to Le Divorce and Le Mariage. How did you come to write them? Diane Johnson: I went to Paris in 1995 with my husband, [a research physician] who was taking up work...

The only award sexier than the Scientific & Technical Oscars and more real estate-heavy than the “Ingenies” (if you don’t know what that means, watch John Koblin’s red-carpet coverage) is the Real Estate Board of New York’s Residential Deal of the Year trophy. There are...

I remember an occasion in San Francisco, years ago, when the writer Tillie Olsen invited other women writers of the area to dinner at her house, where by way of introducing her guests, in the sweetest possible manner, she went around the room telling a...

["The Shadow Knows" is an ambitious pseudo-suspense novel] notable for the psychological subtlety with which it traces the sliding of fear into paranoia and for its portrayal of two black women—one a born victim of great dignity, the other a madwoman of grotesque proportions—who are closely associated with the narrator. But for all its brilliance of insight and characterization, "The Shadow Knows" is significantly flawed by a basic irresolution, by the failure of [D...

The pall of dread hangs over Lying Low—not terror, but something slower, vaguer, the nightmares of a summer afternoon before the thunder when the air is thick, and horror, yet unnameable, hints but does not reveal itself. The success of this novel rests almost entirely on its tone. Johnson speaks in the voice of the observer of the American condition whose data suggests that our only possible fate is to have our throats cut in our beds by unlikely strangers…. Johnson is highly successful in de...

"If you are going to have lovers and a life of freedom and intellect, you have to expect unwed pregnancies and divorces and malice and mistakes," [said N., the protagonist of The Shadow Knows]. But just a minute. Is that really what a life of intellect implies? It's hardly a foregone conclusion … [and] all this reductive reasoning is difficult to go along with. We are never told what's responsible for N.'s incredible passivity, why she is so devoid of energy, always...