SOURCE: “Too Many Hands,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4761, July 1, 1994, p. 21.

In the following review, Broughton complains about the pretentiousness of the main characters in Gilchrist's Starcarbon.

There are forty-five names mapped on to the family tree that prefaces this novel: forty-five characters, from five generations of Hands and Mannings. Readers who have followed Ellen Gilchrist’s saga of the Deep South will have a head start on newcomers and will recognize Olivia de Havilland Hand as the half-Native American niece, rescued by her novelist aunt, Anna (of The Anna Papers and elsewhere), and restored, in I Cannot Get You Close Enough, to her birthright of wealth and privilege as the long-lost daughter of the feckless and tipsy heart-throb, Daniel Hand. Even those familiar with the intricacies of Hand genealogy, and with its generations of trusty family retainers, will still have to contend with Olivia’s equally fecund...