[After "Jill" and "A Girl in Winter," Larkin's fiction] stopped dead. As Larkin has ruefully explained, he waited for more fiction to come—but it never did.

Why? Well, the two novels we have provide what clues there are. In this respect "Jill" (1946) is the less significant book. It is less significant because anyone could have written it—or, to put the point more exactly, it needn't have been written by Philip Larkin. Blending fantasy and self-absorption in the usual first-novel style, it recounts the gaucheries of a furtive, owlish working-class boy during his first term at Oxford: the hero's queasy sense of social inferiority, his emulation of a dissolute roommate, and his own graceless erotic yearnings combine to bring about his tragicomic humiliation. "Jill" is a funny, confused, likable and quite undisconcerting book.

"A Girl in Winter," published in England in 1947, is something else again: it is...