SOURCE: "As Ruby Lay Dying," in The New York Times Book Review, April 30, 1989, pp. 12-13.

Powell is an American novelist, short story writer, and critic. In the following positive review of A Virtuous Woman, he maintains that the novel has a "remarkable structure" that compensates for the lack of "verbal and dramatic fireworks."

All the people in Kaye Gibbons's second novel, A Virtuous Woman, are, as they might put it, considerable banged up. Two women, vestiges of Southern belles, have had to marry tenant farmers, or worse. A son has seen his daddy smashed by a tractor. Another son has been (s)mothered into raping a woman and hanging a mule. A heavy black maid must wrap her knees with Ace bandages in order to stoop and bend. And the woman of virtue referred to in the title is the wife of a migrant farm laborer who, when...