SOURCE: "Novel Conditions," in The Nation, Vol. 239, No. 14, November 3, 1984, pp. 459-60.

In the following review, Birmelin praises Fox's ability in A Servant's Tale to render the perspective of social powerlessness but finds her choice of narrative style too opaque.

Nadine Gordimer has described black South African playwrights as being concerned not with the development of actions but with the representation of conditions. In her latest novel, A Servant's Tale, Paula Fox, who is one of our most intelligent (and least appreciated) contemporary novelists, clearly has represented conditions. Fox's earlier novel The Widow's Children, about several generations of Cuban-born Spaniards in America, reverberates with much more than family history, though it is also marvelously specific as to time, place and character. In A Servant's Tale, the conditions represented are those in the life of a Hispanic woman named Luisa. Born and raised on a small island in the Caribbean...