Everything in "Winter Journey" corresponds—twice, wine is thrown in someone's face; three times, a face is slapped; faces are bruised and smashed by automobiles, not to mention a dog—and yet nothing in "Winter Journey" smacks of the laboratory or smells of the writer's workshop. Nancy, suspicious of and susceptible to patterns, those repetitions that fill the vacant places, saves the novel from a scheme.

Nancy, in fact, is the most interesting American mother I can recall eavesdropping on in many years…. [She] puts herself together again [after a divorce], and the choice she allows her son to make is a choice she was denied. I have the feeling that in this novel the wrong people have the wrong sex—Rome will do that to you—but the right writer was at the piano.

John Leonard, "'Winter Journey'," in The New York Times, Section III (© 1980 by The...