[The Game,] a deep and able book, is the sensibility romance in its more traditional guise. It not only uses but is deeply sympathetic to those sensitive personal relations, those desires for romantic redemption and for the connection of the prose and the passion, which have been part of its modern stock. The domestic-familial is the root experience, the gropings of the female spirit in adolescence the essential source of character, the search for right faith with right feeling the main line of attack. The day-to-day is there, but must be transcended. The freedom the characters seek is the freedom of imagination, but an imagination still in touch with reality; the moral risks are too much passion or too much prose. (p. 73)
[The] book operates between the real and the abstract, and does so in the interests of creating a structure of meaning beyond that afforded directly by day-to-day reality. But it does so without a unifying surreal, a fully imagined transcendence—instead, all the characters make gestures toward it, as does the novelist herself, by creating a muted figurativeness that gives a supra-structure to the real. (pp. 73-4)
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