SOURCE: Milton, Edith. “The Year in Fiction: 1988.” Massachusetts Review 30, no. 1 (spring 1989): 102-21.

In the following excerpt, Milton asserts that Lurie employs clever technique in The Truth about Lorin Jones by writing a novel about writing but finds shortcomings in the novel's narrow focus and feminist concerns.

In any review of the year's fiction what the reviewer thinks about the books he chooses is certainly less important than what books he chooses to think about. I arbitrarily excluded short stories and translations from this piece—on the grounds that these would make a sufficiently complicated task impossible. But once my focus was narrowed to novels written in English and published in this country during 1988, once I was going about the business of making my selection in earnest, I realized my choices may need some defense.

For these ten books, the limit to which a review will stretch, reveal shamefully...