SOURCE: “Woman's Work,” in Times Literary Supplement, March 24–30, 1989, p. 300.

In the following review, Duchêne praises Have the Men Had Enough? as a work of grace and widespread interest.

Margaret Forster's new novel Have the Men Had Enough?—her fourteenth—is based on her personal experience, and evolved in her mind while she was sitting in a geriatric psychiatric ward, where her loved and respected mother-in-law was in the last throes of senile dementia. It describes the grotesque and dreadful dying out of an ageing brain; but primarily it is concerned to follow the effects of this disintegration within a victim's family. It is a piece of very loyal, gentle but fiercely tenacious activism.

Grandma—who at first, though inclined to use her false teeth as a spoon, maintains intermittent shreds of Glaswegian identity, and can still home in on her Burns or her Scott—is cared for...