SOURCE: "Spiritual Quest Discovers a Reality Only Too Real," in The New York Times, August 30, 1995, p. B2.

In the generally positive review below, Bernstein comments on plot, themes, and characterization in Journey to Ithaca.

The search for meaning, or, as one of the spiritual insurgents in Anita Desai's new novel puts it, for the Divine Visage, can tear life to shreds. It makes people blind to others, contemptuous of mere reality. And yet, of course, those deranged by their quest for the Light dwell in a glow of heroism and purity. When the Buddha sat for 40 days and 40 nights under the bodhi tree he was not tending to household chores. We envy the spiritual searchers and we worship them, even as we find them vaguely disreputable.

Journey to Ithaca, Anita Desai's 10th novel and her first since the celebrated Baumgartner's Bombay, is a kind of love triangle set...