SOURCE: A review of In the Palace of the Movie King, in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 14, No. 1, Spring, 1994, pp. 216-7.

In the following review, Malin comments on Calisher's prose style and offers a positive assessment of In the Palace of the Movie King.

Calisher has not received the critical attention she deserves because she writes in a complex, distinctive way. Her sentences are twisted, skewed, ambiguous. The declarative questions itself; pronouns become “ghostly.” The style is paradoxically clear and indeterminate. Her new novel, in effect, is an ambitious, subtly detailed meditation on place, language, art, and politics. The plot is not very important in a Calisher novel. Here we have a “European” film director who encounters America. He is aware of his marginality. And he understands that this quality applies not only to emigrés (or exiles) but to every man and woman. Although he tries to...