SOURCE: "Making Themselves Over," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4511, September 15, 1989, p. 998.

In the following excerpt, Kavaney positively reviews A Virtuous Woman.

Kaye Gibbons's second novel, A Virtuous Woman, has the simplicity of a good Country-and-Western song; where her first, Ellen Foster, had all the artifice in the world going for its portrait of a child whose naiveté masks a growing sense of the world's real complexity, here she shows us two adults for whom extremity has revealed the bare bones of life. Ruby, a name chosen because Solomon informs us that the price of the virtuous woman is above it, is in alternate chapters dying of lung cancer and going over her life; in the other chapters, after her death, Jack, her husband, is busy mourning her and a life which always turned in detail to disappointment, whatever the consolation she brought him overall.

The biblical echo...