SOURCE: "Snapshots and Artworks," in The New York Times Book Review, March 18, 1984, p. 30.

Beaver is a German-born English critic, novelist, educator, and editor. In the following excerpt from a review of The Dead and the Living, he commends Olds on the intimacy and realism of her family portraits.

[The Dead and the Living] is a family album prefaced by snapshots of the century's agonies—images of executions, race riots and gory death from Tulsa, Okla., to Chile and from Rhodesia to Iran. O.K., we can take it. At this theatrical distance we are not touched to the core.

        The blazing white shirts of the white men
        are blanks on the page, looking at them is like
        looking at the sun, you could go blind.

But we do not go blind. Such horrors are thawed by the rhythm of words. They remain static conundrums to be puzzled out...