SOURCE: “Naked Tea,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 16, 1988, p. 3.

In the following review, Eder offers a generally positive assessment of Home Thoughts, which he compares to the fiction of Kingsley Amis.

“Evasion is paid for” is the moral of Tim Parks’ deceptively blithe novel about a gaggle of British expatriates living, scheming, gossiping and partner swapping in Verona.

In a sense, Home Thoughts is a second-generation Kingsley Amis novel. Its characters are seedy and comical; their intellectual poses mask a schoolboy greediness; their civility is a coat tattered by their own prickles.

In his prime—Lucky Jim and the novels that followed—Amis reflected the tensions and pretensions of postwar Britain, when such things as the welfare state, a certain theoretical idealism, trendy life styles and cultural liveliness were all in the air, if largely to be satirized. There was bounce to the awfulness and a...