["The Shadow Knows" is an ambitious pseudo-suspense novel] notable for the psychological subtlety with which it traces the sliding of fear into paranoia and for its portrayal of two black women—one a born victim of great dignity, the other a madwoman of grotesque proportions—who are closely associated with the narrator. But for all its brilliance of insight and characterization, "The Shadow Knows" is significantly flawed by a basic irresolution, by the failure of [D...

The pall of dread hangs over Lying Low—not terror, but something slower, vaguer, the nightmares of a summer afternoon before the thunder when the air is thick, and horror, yet unnameable, hints but does not reveal itself. The success of this novel rests almost entirely on its tone. Johnson speaks in the voice of the observer of the American condition whose data suggests that our only possible fate is to have our throats cut in our beds by unlikely strangers…. Johnson is highly successful in de...

"If you are going to have lovers and a life of freedom and intellect, you have to expect unwed pregnancies and divorces and malice and mistakes," [said N., the protagonist of The Shadow Knows]. But just a minute. Is that really what a life of intellect implies? It's hardly a foregone conclusion … [and] all this reductive reasoning is difficult to go along with. We are never told what's responsible for N.'s incredible passivity, why she is so devoid of energy, always...

'No man knows what evil lurks in the secret heart of men. But the Shadow Knows.' So I am told by an American friend, a Valentine Dyall-like voice informed the Americans before every episode of a radio serial. The Shadow was a mastermind, a super-detective, anonymous, ubiquitous. The claim of the mystery-voice is, in itself, ambiguous. So, I take it, is Diane Johnson's novel, which is a cunning cross between the intensely articulate plaint of the under-extended intelligent woman and a co...

Diane Johnson is uncannily alert to the subtleties of [her women characters' feelings in Lying Low], and she has no trouble in showing that the reality they inhabit is quite as dangerous as they think it is. (p. 34) The book is less successful with, or maybe just less interested in, its male characters. Anton Wait's artistic and sexual complexities are mentioned rather than explored, and his marginal presence seems mainly designed to set off the quite different qualities of his sister…....