Susan Minot Critical Essay | Critical Review by Richard Eder

Critical Review by Richard Eder

SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “A Tide in the Affairs of Women Plays Out.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (22 October 1992): 4.

In the following review, Eder offers a negative assessment of Folly, calling the novel underdeveloped and predictable.

In Monkeys, her splendid first novel, Susan Minot placed a large and troubled family upon a grid of near and remote radio signals. The children received each tremor, damage and approaching disaster, sometimes clearly and sometimes in a cloudy displacement of frequencies.

In the short stories of the less successful Lust, it was not children receiving and decoding, but young women out in the unbounded sexual world of the late '70s and early '80s. The enigmatic signals came not from their parents but from the men they were involved with.

The sexual battles that Lust's protagonists puzzled over, and invariably lost, were told in graphic contemporary detail. In Folly, the theme is...
(read more)