SOURCE: "Fiction and the Malaise of Our Time," in The Southern Review, Louisiana State University, Vol. 17, No. 3, Summer, 1981, pp. 622-30.

In the following review, Halio favorably assesses The World Is a Wedding.

If literature is the light that imagination shines upon reality, then reading literature inevitably uncovers reality as various, complex, and often strange. Perhaps that is why critics used to refer to the "world" of the writer (some still do), or more grandiloquently to his "universe." Yet in opening a work of literature, of fiction, do we not still look for light that it may shine upon our own world, our own reality, the existence that we daily live? Escapist or sensationalist literature apart, does not fiction bear upon our lives, if not directly, then none the less incisively for being indirect? This is the justification for science fiction that aspires to be taken seriously, but it...