SOURCE: "A Colony of the Disgruntled," in New York Times Book Review, November 20, 1988, p. 11.

In the following review, Robinson offers a mixed assessment of The High Road.

Edna O'Brien is a prolific writer of short stories and novels, noted for the elegance of her prose. The High Road, her second novel in over a decade, is a series of more or less free-standing narratives, framed by opening and concluding scenes that declare certain large themes only developed by contrast or indirection in the intervening narratives.

The language here is often infused with an intense energy, but the form of the novel makes it difficult to know what these energies arise from or tend toward. Most of the stories concern expatriate and vacationing northern Europeans on a Spanish island, while the framing events invoke the earthy primitivity of the island itself, at least as the narrator perceives it.

The...