Madison Smartt Bell Critical Essay | Critical Review by Jack Fuller

SOURCE: "'Silence' Is Golden," in Chicago Tribune Books, November 22, 1987, p. 9.

In the positive review below, Fuller focuses on the structure of The Year of Silence.

A promising but elusive young woman, admired for all the usual reasons, dies of an overdose in Manhattan. Whether the story of this sadly ordinary event comes to anything depends on how the writer decides to tell it.

He can make it a melodrama or a cocaine thriller. He can find in it a tragedy of innocence or the embodiment of the emptiness of existence. He can lapse into cynical black humor or succumb to the sentimentality of despair. Or if he is good enough, he can make something new, reveal things we hadn't known before.

For Madison Smartt Bell in his latest book, The Year of Silence, the death is like a crystal, a transparent, sharp-edged fact that refracts all light...
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