SOURCE: “First and Second Novels,” in Spectator, March 11, 1989, p. 42.

In the following excerpt, Lezard compliments the dialogue and character development in Lucid Stars.

Novelists, since Flaubert I suppose, have tried conscientiously to be as true to the Inner Experience of the characters they write about as possible, and one way of doing this is to put everything into the present tense. It makes it all so much more immediate. So: ‘she opens the fridge’ instead of ‘she opened the fridge.’ This is certainly intimate, but in the wrong hands it can feel like the intimacy of a crowded bus. Andrea Barrett, who is not Damon Runyon and has written Lucid Stars uses this gimmick with a vengeance. Her story, about a succession of relationships and the pseudo-familial obligations they create, takes place over 25 years, so the historic present can be said to Have A Point. Unfortunately, she finds...