Andrea Dworkin Critical Essay | Critical Review by Janice Mall

SOURCE: A review of Ice and Fire and Intercourse, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, May 3, 1987, pp. 1, 7.

In the following review, Mall offers tempered criticism of Ice and Fire and Intercourse.

According to Publishers Weekly, Andrea Dworkin's first novel, Ice and Fire, was turned down by 20 American publishers before its appearance last year in England. One wonders why. True, Dworkin, known as a feminist particularly concerned with pornography, takes a flyer on surrealism in the novel, but the style works for her, at least at first.

Her protagonist is marvelous as a little girl on a working class Jewish block in Camden, N.J., in the 1950s, a girl who defies the unwritten law of her neighborhood by making friends with black and Catholic kids at elementary school and walking, in solitary curiosity and defiance, down the blocks where these proscribed people live. Childhood comes to...
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