SOURCE: Wood, Michael. “Other People's Wives.” New York Review of Books 43, no. 16 (17 October 1996): 48–50.

In the following excerpt, Wood offers a positive assessment of John's Wife.

What's a tour de force? A show of strength, with an emphasis on the show, the performance, the bedazzlement. The strength is artistic, but there is still perhaps an element of arm-twisting. Does the phrase necessarily imply that we like the show less than we admire it? Or only that there are shows we like more than this one, scenes where dazzled admiration is not the main feeling we have?

The tour de force in both of these new novels involves a certain kind of wager with the expected, in which everything is the way we imagined it would be, only more so. This is partly a question of style, of waking weary old idioms to new life and driving them over the...