Beryl Bainbridge's A Quiet Life [is a success]. The quintessential family novel, its tiny world is confined to Mother, Father, and daughter Madge. It is son Alan through whose flawed vision we see the rest of the family. Madge, by an obscure miracle of valor and will, has managed to rescue a small part of honesty, feeling, and humor from the tight prison of the childhood which Alan recalls in his memoir of a dreary, postwar Lancashire seaside town. Poverty and dishonor are both personal—the result of Father's unsound business practices—and the general lot of the country at large. The family is locked inside its middle-class gentilities; yearning for better things, for romance, new hats, social status, money, a bit of fun, a bit of love, its members jangle hilariously against each others' suspicions and expectations. The father is frantic with a passion of jealousy for...