SOURCE: "Books Considered," in New Republic, Vol. 176, No. 3, January 15, 1977, pp. 27-28.

In the following review, Milton finds The Widow's Children to be a brilliant and accurate portrayal of the suffocating nature of contemporary life.

Years ago, I heard Elizabeth Bowen give a lecture on the difficulties of writing a novel. Describing the Retreat from Moscow, she inferred, was nothing compared to getting people to move from one room to another: why were they moving? how much should one go into why and how? I seem to recall her saying that Virginia Woolf, having once spent three months separating her characters from their boeuf en daube, was stuck with them for another six, hanging about in the passage.

Elizabeth Bowen implied that this problem of short-distance transit was an artistic nuisance; but I think she meant one to accept it also as a cultural fact which the artistic difficulty...