SOURCE: "Breathing Hope and Despair," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4313, November 29, 1985, p. 1353.

[In the following review of A Family Likeness, Brown comments on Lavin's themes and style.]

There is something rather un-Irish about Mary Lavin's prose: it doesn't sing or soar or weep, it has no lilt, no twang even, and the sentences straggle and falter and thud. There is hardly a sentence in her new book of short stories, her first for eight years, which could be described as "beautifully turned", and she salvages no aphorisms or last-line truths from the sadness of her tales. The only poetic line in the book—"Nature ever was a deceiver"—is uttered by a newly-wed young woman. "Surely this was a strange thing for a young girl to say on her honeymoon?" her husband thinks, years later. V.S. Pritchett recently said that his own short stories are concerned...