SOURCE: McGrann, Molly. Review of Disobedience, by Jane Hamilton. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5105 (2 February 2001): 23.

In the following review, McGrann explores the significance of the disconnect between past and present in the characters of Disobedience, observing that the novel's tension hinges on the relationship between mother and son.

Thirty-eight-year-old Beth Shaw (Eliza) is having an affair with a Ukrainian violinist, partly conducted through passionate daily e-mails [in Disobedience]. These are discovered by seventeen-year-old Henry Shaw when he accidentally opens his mother's file. “I was the boy in the family and therefore, statistically, the person most likely to seize upon the computer culture, the child to wire the household, tune it into our century.”

The Shaw family are mostly out of step with the twenty-first century: Beth's husband, Kevin, teaches history, and he and their daughter, Elvira, are “living historians” or Civil War re-enactors, spending their weekends sleeping in fields...