SOURCE: "Hilly and Harry, an Enduring Love Story," in The Wall Street Journal, Vol. CCXX, No. 90, November 4, 1992, p. A12.

In the following review, Sacks offers a favorable assessment of Love's Mansion.

Any marriage lasting 50 years deserves to be written up. In his moving and highly enjoyable novel Love's Mansion Paul West presents a thinly fictionalized memoir of his parents, starting with their shared childhood in an English Midlands village in the early 1900s and ending with his widowed mother's recent death at age 94.

Giving them new names—Hilly and Harry Moxton—Mr. West treats them with candor, sympathy and (for the reader) merciful selectivity, focusing on certain episodes but flying through whole decades in between. In its unpretentious way, Love's Mansion is a tale of the 20th century, and a tribute to the aspiring human spirit (symbolized, in this novel, by music). "To live amidst the universe without...