SOURCE: "The Widow and the Terrorist," in The Wall Street Journal, July 15, 1994, p. A 11.

In the following review, Bawer offers a largely positive assessment of House of Splendid Isolation, but notes some stylistic weaknesses.

Since the appearance of her first novel, The Country Girls, in I960. Edna O'Brien has won fame as a passionate, lyrical prose stylist and a sensitive observer of long-suffering Irishwomen and their barbaric husbands. Her 13th novel, House of Splendid Isolation, centers on a paradigmatic O'Brien heroine a reclusive old widow named Josie O'Meara who lives among "listless fields" on the outskirts of a village.

Yet this book marks a departure for Ms. O'Brien. For she's taken this "women's novel" protagonist and placed her in a story right out of a high-concept male-targeted movie thriller. McGreevy, an Irish Republican Army terrorist who's wanted for murders and bombings and tagged by police as a "madman...