SOURCE: "The Endless Possibilities of Ordinary Life," in Irish Literary Supplement, Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring, 1997, pp. 19-20.

In the following review, Hand connects the narrative perspective of Reading in the Dark to aspects of Deane's critical career.

It is inevitable that a first novel by an author with a well established academic and critical career will be approached—certainly by other critics and academics—with the lumbering baggage of various expectations and preconceptions of what will be found there. This is very much so with Seamus Deane's Reading in the Dark. One reason for this is that the novel has been a long time coming—in a biographical note in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing published in 1991, Reading in the Dark was listed as having been published the previous year.

Whatever the explanation for such a delay—and six years is a long time—these preconceptions and...