This novel ["The Long View"]—Elizabeth Jane Howard's second—is a very good one, aimed to please and not perturb. Technically its design is an anti-chronological arrangement of episodes in the lives of a comparatively cultured, reasonably well-off married couple, Conrad and Antonia Fleming—Arcades ambo, egoists both, he the infallible tyrant, she the acquiescent resister. Each nicely selected episode (they are datelined respectively 1950, 1942, 1937, 1927 and 1926) contains a dramatic situation. Indeed, the word 'situation' is used as a kind of paper-clip: the opening of Part I being 'This, then, was the situation,' Part II begins 'The situation is perfectly simple'—and so on from part to part. It is the only obtrusive gadget of an ingenious construction, if we agree to ignore the contrivance that at the end of the first (or last) episode the susceptible and soignée Antonia is confronted responsively by a masterful and mysterious...