SOURCE: “Unflinching in the Face of Disaster,” in Spectator, June 25, 1994, pp. 30–31.

In the following favorable review, Brookner describes Forster's novel Mothers' Boys as “less like a novel than a documentary.”

In the annals of contemporary fiction Margaret Forster scores a comfortable beta plus. She deals firmly with contemporary dilemmas, lonely old ladies, senile mothers-in-law, relatives battling over motherless children, and contrives to make them all interesting. She is on the side of the angels, and writes an effortless, no-nonsense English. She can also escape, memorably, into the Gothic, and there is much to admire in her steadfast industry. She is in many ways the epitome of the professional writer, never growing stale, never flinching from her task, however distressing that might be.

In Mothers' Boys she is as concerned as ever. It must have taken some resolution to deal with this enigma of a meaningless assault on one...