Mothers and daughters who manage to speak to each other without the urge to kill are going to love this novel because it will make them feel so good.

If you can believe Evan Hunter, there can't be many mothers and daughters who enjoy what we like to think of as a normal, happy relationship. Indeed, he wasn't able to find any, and ["Mothers and Daughters"] is a ghastly parade of intolerably messed up people with tormented psyches and quivering ids.

Incidentally, the title is woefully incomplete. It would have been closer to the mark if it had been "Mothers and Daughters and Sons and Husbands and Assorted Slobs," or something of the sort….

The novel covers 20 years up to about the present, and after three evenings of wallowing in it I was beginning to fear it would take me 20 years to finish it. Hunter goes into the...