Alice McDermott Critical Essay | Critical Review by Anne Tyler

SOURCE: A review of A Bigamist's Daughter, in The New York Times Book Review, February 21, 1982, pp. 1, 28-9.

An American novelist, short story writer, critic, and editor, Tyler won a National Book Critics Circle Award for The Accidental Tourist (1985) and a Pulitzer Prize for her Breathing Lessons (1988). In the following, she offers a mixed assessment of A Bigamist's Daughter and maintains that, despite its occasionally fatuous characterization, the novel effectively demonstrates how childhood experiences determine adult expectations of love.

The heroine of Alice McDermott's first novel [A Bigamist's Daughter] is a young woman who works for a vanity press. In an office so bland and sleazy that it reminds her of an unlicensed electrolysis salon Elizabeth reads the summaries (but never the actual manuscripts) of books like How to Win with Jesus During the Coming Holocaust and The Last Kiss of Love. She murmurs a few...
(read more)