SOURCE: “Community vs. Family and Writer vs. Subject,” in New York Times, July 12, 1993, p. C16.

In the following review, Lehmann-Haupt offers tempered assessment of Pigs in Heaven, praising Kingsolver's prose and humor though finding fault in the novel's lack of moral tension.

“Women on their own run in Alice's family. This dawns on her with the unkindness of a heart attack and she sits up in bed to get a closer look at her thoughts, which have collected above her in the dark.” So begins the appealing homespun poetry of Barbara Kingsolver's new novel, Pigs in Heaven, about a moral conflict between the claims of mother love and the needs of a community.

What Alice Greer sees above her in the dark are the thoughts that her latest marriage has gone dead and that she longs for the company of her daughter, Taylor, who lives in Tucson, Ariz...