SOURCE: “On the Other Hand …,” in Commonweal, February 12, 1993, p. 23.

In the following review, Malin offers a positive assessment of Natural History, complimenting the novel's complexity and depth.

Natural History deserves more than a brief review. It moves on at least three levels: it is, first, a study of the Bray family—Billy and Nell, the parents, and James and Catherine their children; it is also a study of “history,” a meditation, if you will, on what the word means not only to the Bray children but to all who want to recapture the “past” and discover that it never existed as implacable fact; it is, finally about the “mix” of art and reality, of “word” and “world.” These three levels, in effect, do not move in any linear manner; thus any page of the novel combines the various levels and, indeed, makes them into a maze of meaning...