[In Ordinary People] Judith Guest takes an 'ordinary' … family in which the son, 17-year-old Conrad Jarrett, has just returned home from a mental hospital, eight months after a suicide attempt. Her technique is to reveal information about Conrad and his parents, Calvin and Beth, in a colloquial, present-tense, piecemeal way—a method more often found in thrillers or adventure stories. She uses the technique extremely skilfully, with twists and turns that come like the proverbial unexpected buckets of cold water. There is nothing sentimental in the way she presents her characters….

Psychologically, the book might have been even more probing if the problem rested between these three characters. But it has been detonated by the death of a fourth—Conrad's drowned elder brother. This tragedy has stripped away the normality which fuelled the parents' daily life, and has revealed their inadequacies….

Sentimentality comes in with the psychologist, Dr...