SOURCE: "Violently Obsessed With Art," in New York Times Book Review, November 28, 1993, p. 1.

In the following review, Lesser discusses the narrator which appears in both The Book of Evidence and Ghosts, and asserts that, "Where the narrator in The Book of Evidence was always striving for effect, the narrator in Ghosts quietly achieves it."

The latest novel by the Irish writer John Banville, [Ghosts,] is a bit like a Peter Greenaway film: the visual elements are entrancing, the mystery plot is intricate and obscure, and the characters are all faintly (sometimes aggressively) threatening oddballs. Like Mr. Greenaway, Mr. Banville is particularly interested in humankind's strange mixture of passions for the beautiful and the violent, especially in combination. But while we have come to expect this mixture in movies (think of Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma), it is less common to come across...