SOURCE: Bell, Pearl K. “Fiction Chronicle.” Partisan Review 60, no. 1 (winter 1993): 65-6.

In the following excerpt, Bell asserts that the conclusion of Before and After leaves too many loose ends unresolved.

A brutal murder is also at the heart of Rosellen Brown's Before and After, and like Tartt's novel, it was an immediate bestseller, with the film rights quickly snapped up. Beyond this, however, the two novels have little in common. Brown is an intelligent, thoughtful writer, of poetry as well as fiction, who is not tempted into pretension. Her new novel is a domestic tragedy about a family of recognizable human beings whose normally stable, predictably uneventful life is shattered by an act of willful savagery.

Ben and Carolyn Reiser, with their twelve-year-old daughter Judith and seventeen-year-old son Jacob, live in a small New Hampshire town, where Carolyn is a busy pediatrician and Ben is a sculptor who...