SOURCE: “Sold South,” in Times Literary Supplement, September 25, 1998, p. 22.

Oates is the author of several novels, including Man Crazy. In the following review, she asserts that while there are some well-written individual scenes in Smiley's The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, the novel does not work as a whole.

What's in a title? There is a certain gravity signalled by such ponderous nineteenth-century titles as War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Red and the Black. The discreet alliterations of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, still more Peregrine Pickle, suggest gravity lightened by wit. There are tersely symbolic and “poetic” titles—The Golden Bowl, The Cherry Orchard, The Rainbow, To the Lighthouse, The Crucible—that remain classy and fashionable. There are pointedly allusive titles—The Sound and the Fury, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Violent Bear It Away, A Flag for Sunrise, The...