[At the end of] The Clock-Winder, the domestic settlement and content which have been achieved are seen slightly distanced, through the subdued distress of Peter, hitherto offstage. 'He's just back from Vietnam,' they say of him. 'Everyone murmured, as if that explained things.'
Miss Tyler's book is quite apolitical…. [It] is warmly and shrewdly written, the characters are persuasive, and there is a salutary sense that bourgeois life is not necessarily rotten to the core. The novel will give pleasure and perhaps restoration to its readers, who will be mostly middle-aged and middle-class: and it has every right to do so. Nevertheless, for a writer as alert as Miss Tyler evidently is to produce a book as graceful and cheering as this does involve some sort of withdrawal from horrors of which non-fictional Americans today are not allowed to be unaware, and the inspiration which shows us the happy ending through the cool eyes of the war veteran was perhaps a twinge of conscience. (p. 157)
Jim Hunter, in The Listener (© British Broadcasting Corp. 1973; reprinted by permission of Jim Hunter), February 1, 1973.
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