Mary Lee Settle, best known as an historical novelist, is, like most Southern writers since Faulkner, preoccupied with memory. In Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday the shadow of the past falls continually on the present, and the characters move through the half-light like figures in a trance, their speech a long, reminiscent lament. The whole book is a kind of mourning ballad for the futility and tragedy of the South….
[The McKarkles are] a predictable family built for melodrama, and Miss Settle succeeds only fitfully in raising their experience to the level of tragedy. Behind her accent on memory is a determination to find "the key place, the point, the place where a man stopped and pivoted"….
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