SOURCE: “‘Finish, Good Lady; The Bright Day Is Done,’” in Washington Post Book World, Vol. XII, No. 19, May 9, 1982, p. 4.

In the following positive review, Epstein compliments the efficient and textured prose in The Christmas Tree.

Not well known on this side of the Atlantic, the Irish writer Jennifer Johnston has a solid, and well-deserved, readership in Great Britain. The Christmas Tree is her tense, spare, highly-textured sixth novel. In it Johnston coils her language so tightly that she achieves the compression we usually associate with a cryptic, photographic sort of poetry. Her language intercepts with Emily Dickinson's, a “certain Slant of light” that anatomizes landscape and memory.

The Christmas Tree unfolds in a series of vignettes, flashbacks, and waking dreams that define its dying narrator, Constance Keating. A solitary wanderer, Constance has recently returned to her family's home in Ireland from a trip to Italy. There she had...