SOURCE: "Taken in Hand," in Newsweek, Vol. LXXX, No. 13, September 25, 1972, pp. 25-26.

In the following review, Prescott finds The Western Coast stylistically interesting but its plot and purpose unclear.

Other fiction writers will appreciate the formidable technical hurdles that Paula Fox set for herself in this, her third and most ambitious novel [The Western Coast]. There is almost no plot, for one thing, no story line strong enough to sustain suspense or even to indicate an inexorable direction; the novel instead consists of a series of events, some quite dramatic, which involve a large but continually changing group of characters. For another, the story so scrupulously re-creates a particular place in a particular time, and kinds of people who have often been written about badly before, that the novel serves as a kind of social history, convincing us that this is the way it must have been. Most...