SOURCE: "The Terror and the Pity," in The New Republic, June 13, 1994, pp. 52-3.

In the following review, Lee offers a mixed evaluation of House of Splendid Isolation.

"The Ireland you're chasing is a dream … doesn't exist anymore…. It's gone. It's with O'Leary in the grave." That's what we're told. The heroes have become terrorist, Queen Maeve is a battered wife, the big house is derelict. As Mary Hooligan says at the end of Edna O'Brien's novel Night (1972), "The harp that once through Tara's halls is silenced, mute." Baba, one of the original "country girls" from the fine Irish trilogy that made O'Brien's name in the 1960s, looks back on the past, twenty-five years later, in a bitter "Epilogue" written in 1987. She savages anything that will tear at her heartstrings as "pure slop": "Too fucking elegiac." Yet Baba ends her retrospect lamenting. "I want time to be put back...