SOURCE: “Lost in the Moder Kontry,” in New York Times Book Review, April 29, 1990, p. 30.

In the following review, McKnight offers a favorable assessment of The Family.

“The writer with the tin ear,” wrote John Gardener, in his book On Becoming a Novelist, who is good enough at other things, “may in the end write deeper, finer novels than the most eloquent verbal musicians.” It was the writer's facility with those “other things“—the development of “character, action, setting” and ideas, which Gardner called “profluence”—that compelled the reader to turn the page.

There are, of course many novelists whose prose is both poetic and profluent: Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Nathanael West. But some of the most highly regarded novelists (Balzac, Crane, Orwell), as Gardner suggested, are no poets at all.

Most readers, no doubt, would include the works of the Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta in the latter category...