SOURCE: “Pondering a Family Mystery,” in The New Leader, June 16-30, 1986, p. 20.

In the following review, Cavell offers a generally positive assessment of The Bobby-Soxer, though she finds shortcomings in the disorienting quality of the writing.

The themes of Hortense Calisher’s latest novel will be familiar to readers of her earlier works: how we live each other’s lives, discovering ourselves and them in the process (her short stories are full of such wonderfully strange identifications); the intimate interconnectedness between persons and events that is revealed only in time, through reflection and dialogue; the present as a tale whose telling thus requires the future. In The Bobby-Soxer there is another theme as well—“the haunted provincialism in American life,” as one character puts it.

All these demand a reader’s patient collaboration; and for me, at least, the narrative is not sufficiently compelling. We are often in...