SOURCE: "Poised between hell and purgatory: The fiction of Madison Smartt Bell," in Chicago Tribune Books, May 30, 1993, p. 6.

In the review below, Solomon focuses on the detailed descriptions and realistic characters of Save Me, Joe Louis, especially "Bell's sharp insights into, and extraordinary compassion for, his outcast protagonists."

The seven novels and two story collections that comprise the oeuvre of Madison Smartt Bell at age 35 make him one of our most prolific and precocious talents. What grows clearer with each book is Bell's unique wedding of intelligence and craft to a signature angle of vision that marks him as one of our more courageous and large-souled talents as well.

Bell might be described as a regional writer—his region being the foggy border that buffers purgatory from hell in the sootiest creases of contemporary society. The plots he sets in motion there, if merely described, would sound as...