SOURCE: "Anita Desai's Clear Light of Day," in Chicago Review, Vol. 33, No. 1, Summer, 1981, pp. 107-12.

In the generally positive review below, Daniels discusses the themes, characterization, and narrative structures in Clear Light of Day.

Clear Light of Day is an English novel (as distinct from American, Russian or French), and it surpasses all other novels in English set in India in characterization, poetic use of landscape and integrity of vision. As might have been expected, the publisher's description finds in the novel "echoes we haven't heard since E. M. Forster's A Passage to India." This is somewhat misleading. Anita Desai's novel brings to mind not the Forster of A Passage but the Forster of Howard's End. In broad conception, the similarities between the two novels are obvious: the atmosphere of both novels is built around a house, both might have been titled Two Sisters (in Desai's novel, the...