SOURCE: "Grief That Lasts Forever," in The New York Times Book Review, April 12, 1992, p. 3.

Klinkenborg is an editor and nonfiction writer. In the following review, he provides a highly favorable assessment of At Weddings and Wakes.

Alice McDermott's At Weddings and Wakes is her third novel in a decade. But after three books, her voice still has enough unfamiliarity to keep a reader slightly off balance. You're not quite sure what to expect of a McDermott novel, and this is her own doing. For although they share some thematic constants, each of Ms. McDermott's books—A Bigamist's Daughter, That Night and now At Weddings and Wakes—seems to have fashioned, for her, a wholly new fictional manner of being.

We are used to speaking of a writer's growth, as if the increasing stature of each new book could be marked on a kind of critical doorjamb. But there...