[Coronation is] a richly-textured academic novel, academic certainly not through any lifelessness but because its technique is traditional and conversational, conditioned by the leisured lives of its characters and leading to an elaborately contrived climax. Don Andres, an aging Chilean gentleman, does not have to work. French history, his collection of walking sticks, politics, occupy him together with visits to his ninety-four-year-old grandmother, a wearying but essential link with the stylish well-grained past.

Beneath the placid sunny afternoons, however, nothing is really well. Andres's existence is merely elegant absence of death. Terrified of mortality and whole-heartedness he has never risked taking a bite out of life. The old lady herself is only apparently harmless. Cloudy with sexual fantasies she is capable of spasmodic and disconcerting insights, particularly venomous when a teenage maid moves into the ornate decrepit mansion. Croaking out malice about Estelle and himself she jogs Andres...