SOURCE: “Making Sense of What Takes Place,” in Hudson Review, Vol. XLV, No. 3, Autumn, 1992, pp. 491-98.

In the following excerpt, Phillips offers a favorable assessment of The Lost Father, though notes that the novel is hindered by repetitious description.

“I know of almost no pleasure greater than having a piece of fiction draw together disparate incidents so that they relate to one another and confirm that feeling that life itself is a creative process,” John Cheever wrote in one of his letters; “that one thing is put purposefully upon another, that what is lost in one encounter is replenished in the rest, and that we possess some power to make sense of what takes place.” The best of the following works of fiction accomplish just that, and when a novel or story fails, it often may be because the writer failed to “make sense of what takes place...