SOURCE: "Two Timers," in Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, Vol. 4, No. 4, Summer, 1989, p. 7.

In the following excerpt, D'Errico favorably assesses A Virtuous Woman, but faults Gibbons's use of multiple narrators in the final chapter as an instance of technique overpowering content.

Her slim, elegant first novel, Ellen Foster, displayed Kaye Gibbons's formidable talent for rendering first-person internal monologue, shifting time frames, and "southern" dialect, breathing life into a character and a tale that are unforgettable. A Virtuous Woman, her second novel, has many of the same characteristics. The story is told through alternating internal monologues from the past and present by Blinking Jack Ernest Stokes ("stokes the fire, stokes the stove, stokes the fiery furnace of hell!") and his wife, Ruby Pitt Woodrow Stokes, who has died of lung cancer at the outset of the novel.

As in Ellen Foster, the first-person storytelling technique brings...