Highsmith's purposes are evidently sterner than the mere setting down of [a] sad chronicle of family life [in Edith's Diary]: her characters and their circumstances are transparently emblematic of the state of the Union, as well as of the union, in the horrible Vietnam years—the do-gooding that refuses responsibility and results too easily in death for the done-good-by, the lying and evasions of men unwilling to accept the consequences of their actions, the inheritance by the rootless and thoughtless of America the once-beautiful, the irrevocable passing of that patrician strain that, for all its shortcomings, carried within it the ideals of 1776. It is a very pessimistic view of America and, in Miss Highsmith's wonderfully insinuating prose, a very convincing one. Can it really be like that? (p. 699)

Neil Hepburn, "Nuclear Reactions," in The Listener (© British Broadcasting Corp. 1977; reprinted by permission of Neil Hepburn), Vol. 97, No. 2510, May 26, 1977, pp...