SOURCE: King, Francis. “Variations on a Simple Theme.” Spectator 280, no. 8844 (7 February 1998): 33-4.

In the following review, King criticizes Ōe's “disturbing” fictionalization of events from his personal life in A Quiet Life.

A single event soars up, a sheer, jagged, snow-covered peak, from the otherwise temperate landscape of Kenzaburo Oe's life. This was the birth, in 1963, of a first child with a cerebral defect which, over the years, has had increasingly tragic consequences for the boy's physical and mental development. From this event, an avalanche of short stories, novels and essays has swept down. The latest in what Oe himself has, chillingly, called the ‘idiot son narratives’, this book [A Quiet Life] is a fictionalised account of further episodes in the life of this boy, now seen not, as in the past, through the eyes of Oe himself but of the boy's 20-year-old sister.

Many novelists have fed to...