SOURCE: A review of A Bigamist's Daughter, in The Village Voice, Vol. XXVII, No. 8, February 23, 1982, p. 43.

In the following positive review of A Bigamist's Daughter, Harvey commends McDermott's refusal to sentimentalize her characters' loneliness.

It's no disparagement of Alice McDermott's disturbing first novel [A Bigamist's Daughter] to note how much it resonates with the echo of Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts. Young writers can't live in a literary vacuum; the best way they can render homage to the books they love is to find that strain in themselves which responds to those works, and channel it into something distinctively theirs. From commonplaces mined in so much undistinguished fiction—suburban girlhood replete with aloof Mommy and elusive Daddy, the Manhattan-singles life of studio apartments, frayed white-collar jobs and unassailable emotional defenses—McDermott has fashioned a tale which sounds, for a change, like truth. Her prose is spare and acidic, complementing...