SOURCE: “No Ends to Obsession,” in Commonweal, Vol. CXI, No. 14, August 10, 1984, pp. 441–42.

In the following negative review of Foreign Bodies, Reedy contends that Harrison “puts forward a wealth of interesting material, but describes the work as “a deeply unfinished novel.”

Foreign Bodies, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison’s fourth book and first novel, explores two major sequences in the life of Angela, its principal character and narrator. The first is her late adolescence and early adulthood. Here Angela begins to see the limitations of her mother and falls in love with David Larrimar, her forty-year-old English teacher, who takes her in hand and liberates her from the narrow background of her family. David is also a homosexual; he loves Angela yet cannot give her the active sexual life for which the novel as a whole indicates her predilection. When Angela marries another man, David commits suicide; as a result of...