SOURCE: “The Year in Fiction: 1990,” in Massachusetts Review, Vol. XXXII, No. 1, Spring, 1991, pp. 123-46.

In the following excerpted review, Brown offers qualified praise for Animal Dreams, finding fault in the novel's idealized characters and resolution.

Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams, on the other hand, is a book almost too perfectly made. This is a wonderfully capacious novel that was easy to enter and to stay in, and I was delighted with its gemmy treasures of insight and phrase. And yet when I'd finished it I felt the ingratitude that wishes artfulness to be roughed up into art, wants intelligence and moral earnestness to be shaken a little bit more by uncertainty: wants, I suppose, at least a little of the willful improvisatory quality I have just found in excess in [John Edgar] Wideman's book [Philadelphia Fire]. John Gardner called it “raggedness.”

Animal Dreams asks its questions as straightforwardly as...