SOURCE: “Titanic Resurfaces in Yet Another Novel,” in Chicago Tribune, November 22, 1996, p. 3.

In the following review, Heller offers positive assessment of Every Man for Himself.

The most famous shipwreck of our century has launched its own literary genre. Walter Lord, who penned the 1955 best seller A Night to Remember, “recently remarked, without much exaggeration, that a new book about the Titanic disaster is published every week,” writes Steven Biel in Down With the Old Canoe, a cultural history of the disaster published a few weeks ago.

Sure enough, this week's Titanic volume is British novelist Beryl Bainbridge's lyrical Every Man for Himself, which follows Norwegian author Erik Fosnes Hansen's Psalm at Journey's End. These books all arrive on the heels of the failed attempt in August to dredge a 21-ton section of the Titanic from the North Atlantic floor.

The narrator of Every Man is young Morgan, named...