SOURCE: Peck, Dale. “The Devil You Know.” New Republic (31 December 2001): 38–41.

In the following review, Peck offers a negative assessment of The Devil's Larder as well as an extended negative critique of Crace's entire oeuvre.

The difference between curiosity and promiscuity is much the same for writers as it is for lovers. The first is a good thing, the second bad, the line between the two rather blurry. At what point is inquisitiveness revealed to be a wandering eye, an inability to focus or to commit?

Over the past fifteen years, the British novelist Jim Crace has wooed an international audience with six clever tales about a fictitious continent, a Stone Age society, a fruit market, a shipwreck, an adolescent Jesus, and dead people. Yet each new book has had the effect of reducing rather than enlarging his oeuvre. Awards have been given, comparisons made to J. M. Coetzee...