SOURCE: “Voices in the Night,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 7, 1994, p. 15.

In the following review, Akins offers a positive assessment of The Ice Storm.

This is not so much a novel as an excavation—of that nearly but not quite extinct entity the nuclear family as it was in those dark ages, the 1970s. The argot, the foibles, the fads and the artifacts: They're all here [in The Ice Storm], meticulously catalogued and historically framed with discussions of the design, politics and groping psychology of the period. In the midst of this exactingly reconstructed rubble we find the Hoods, a family of four. Because the Hoods live in the suburbs—in “the most congenial and superficially calm of suburbs”—we may be sure there's plenty to uncover, all manner of unsuspected subterranean doings and undoings. And in fact, the Hoods are having quite a day, which...