SOURCE: "Silences," in The New Republic, Vol. 179, No. 5, July 29, 1978, pp. 32-4.

In the following review, Oates contends that Silences suffers from omissions, uneven tone, and faulty logic.

The highest art appears to contain an entire world in miniature: entering it, one experiences the illusion of entering into the very center of the human cosmos, penetrating immediately the depths of the human imagination. If the most perfect forms of art have the quality of being "static"—in Joyce's sense of the term—it is because they are beyond and above time. Of course they exclude a great deal, and yet they give the impression of excluding nothing. They are complete; they point to nothing outside themselves; one grasps them as esthetic wholes, moved by their authority.

There is no more powerfully moving a piece of fiction in recent years than Tillie Olsen's long story "Tell Me a Riddle," which...