SOURCE: Bell, Millicent. “Fiction Chronicle.” Partisan Review 64, no. 4 (fall 1997): 609–19.

In the following excerpt, Bell offers a generally positive assessment of Briar Rose.

“What's the story, Wishbone?” the song asks the fox terrier as though even a dog in a PBS children's program would know that stories are the secret of meaning, our way of making sense of our lives. Beginnings, middles and ends. Cause and effect. Character and plot. This happened because this other thing had happened before. Or because someone of a certain kind was the doer of the deed. Ever so often we think that the non-story-ness of our experience is the truth about it—and writers write postmodern novels. But the ache these induce! How we want someone to put it all together, to make a tale!

Robert Coover—who has written postmodern fiction and directs, at Brown University, the study of the serendipitous cohesions...