SOURCE: "Hooligan's Wake," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 3,683, October 6, 1972, p. 1184.

In the following review, the critic provides a largely negative assessment of Night, in which O'Brien is faulted for failing to sustain and build on the "strength and honesty" in her writing.

A grievance and an exasperation to critics they are, those writers who are as bad as possible and yet never let us quite out of their pockets. (Their style is so catching too.) By about page 10 of Night a series of useful phrases were already beginning to line themselves up: … self-indulgent whimsy … formless preciosity … mixture of narcissism and Irishry as before, but with stylistic knobs (or balls) on … gift-wrapped porn for NW1 people … earlier books better … sense of feeling and fun lost … one long act of public literary masturbation.

And yet. "The silences are unnerving. I can hear my own hair splitting." "There is a substance...