SOURCE: "Obsession," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 8, 1997, p. 6.

In the following review, Innes offers a positive appraisal of Down by the River.

When I was asked to review Edna O'Brien's latest novel, Down by the River, I called my sister in London. I wanted to know if she was still reading this prolific and seminal Irish writer who was so important to us 20 years ago. Newly arrived in London from a small town, we related heavily to Kate and Baba, the mismatched Irish friends of The Country Girls trilogy, O'Brien's first fictional work, for whom England's capital represented freedom from the bigotry of rural Irish life. Now, my sister confessed, she's come to reject O'Brien's deep fatalism about intimacy as "unbelievably depressing." And she hates the way O'Brien's women see themselves: "They're always victims."

Some things never change: The women in Down by the River are...