SOURCE: "The Master," in The London Review of Books, Vol. 17, No. 23, November 30, 1995, p. 12.

Stead is a poet, fiction writer, and critic from New Zealand. In the following review of Shards of Memory, he suggests that when Jhabvala does not attempt "to represent India truthfully, accurately, in all its complexity," her novels, like this one, lack energy and focus.

Henry James's injunction to the novelist was 'Dramatise! Dramatise!' Ezra Pound advocated 'the presentative method'. A dozen lesser but important voices have urged that modern fiction must enact, not tell. The strongest intellectual pressures on the serious novelist in this century have all been, that is to say, in the direction—the ultimate direction—of the playscript or the screenplay and away from the elaboration of prose as prose. But what does the writer do in her novels who finds herself engaged outside them in writing screenplays? Does her...