SOURCE: "Liza Jarrett's Hard Life," in London Review of Books, December 4, 1986, pp. 24, 26.

In the following excerpt, Driver complains that Banville's Mefisto "is massively overwritten with a distinctly Irish lyrical imperative and studious lexicality."

… Mefisto is the most ambitious of these five works, yet in some ways the least successful. It is massively overwritten with a distinctly Irish lyrical imperative and studious lexicality. Rare words are preferred: 'auscultating', 'exsanguinated', 'incarnadined', 'labiate', 'vermiform', 'psittacine', 'rufous', 'lentor', 'strabismic', 'gibbous', 'snathed'. There are too many descriptions like 'a flash of opalescent silk' or 'the air a sheen of damp pearl', and there is too much seasonal reference of the 'It was a hot, hazy day, one of the first of summer' kind. Its ambition is roughly to be a sort of Beckettian comedy of drabness, to maintain a firm hold of childhood perceptions, but not to scruple to render death, disfigurement, indigence...