SOURCE: John Updike, "In Dispraise of the Powers that Be," in New Yorker, Vol. LXIV, No. 17, June 13, 1988, pp. 112-14.

[In the following review, Updike faults Curfew for "too much sticky, tangled prose," and for failing to fulfill its "Dostoyevskian ambition."]

It is sometimes urged upon American authors that they should write more politically, out of a clearer commitment or engagement or sense of protest. Two foreign novels, one by a Chilean and the other by a Nigerian, demonstrate that having a political subject does not automatically give a novel grandeur, urgency, or coherence. Curfew, by the Chilean José Donoso, takes place in 1985, in a crowded time span of less than twenty-four hours bridging the wake and the funeral of Pablo Neruda's widow, Matilde. The occasion collects a number of varied friends and admirers—Mañungo Vera, a folksinger returned from twelve years in Europe; Judit Torre, a blond...