SOURCE: "Gringo Inventions," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4710, July 9, 1993, p. 22.

In the review below, McNeil contends that Allende's treatment of themes in The Infinite Plan is predictable and simplistic, and that her female characters are stereotypical.

"What they most esteemed was the ability to tell a story", Isabel Allende writes in The Infinite Plan. She is referring, here, to the Vietnamese, but you feel she might also be thinking of her own readership. The Chilean writer has been praised for her narrative talents; her hugely successful novels, The House of the Spirits and Eva Luna, had their grounding in the weaving of separate but interlocking narratives, and their compelling marriage of the opulent and the violent earned her the title "the female García Márquez".

This is the first time her fiction has made the journey from Santiago to San Francisco, and it is set in...