GETTING MOTHER'S BODY By Suzan-Lori Parks Random House. 257 pp. $23.95 Suzan-Lori Parks had never written a novel before Getting Mother's Body. And though I've read countless novels, I had never read one like this. The story of Billy Beede and...

The women have old-fashioned first names, evoking, somehow, the apron and the butter churn: Sallie, Bessie, Nellie, Anna Bertie. The men's names are stolid and idiosyncratic: James and John and Frank are represented, but also Clarence and Jewette and Cranville. The slabs yearn up...

Fred Dean was dumbfounded when a voice on the other end of the telephone told him that the remains of his stillborn son buried in Libya 44 years ago had been returned to the U.S."I asked him if he was for real. I didn't believe...

Fred Dean was dumbfounded when a voice on the other end of the telephone told him that the remains of his stillborn son buried in Libya 44 years ago had been returned to the U.S."I asked him if he was for real. I didn't believe...

Ultimately, Family Plot may be more fun to think about than to see—or at least, to see for the fourth time. There are moments of quite stunning intensity…. But some of the principle action sequences seem relatively lax and unfocused, and I suspect that Family Plot figures only half-heartedly as an adventure film. Indeed, it mistrusts adventure, as the best Hitchcock movies often do. Its central position is that a healthy respect for love and money offers better guidance through this vale of te...

Though less pretentious and preposterous than Torn Curtain and Topaz, less ludicrous than Marnie, and less offensive than Frenzy, [Family Plot] is still late Hitchcock, and not very good. (p. 84) There are moments of inventiveness, here and there. When a woman tries to escape from a man in a cemetery whose paths are laid out like lines in a Mondrian painting (Hitchcock's own simile), there is something amusingly nutty about the pair's puny convergences and divergences, when mere cutting across...