In this quietly scarifying, very funny, and wonderfully compassionate novel ["What's for Dinner?"], the poet James Schuyler invents overlapping scenes describing middle-class suburban Americans leading some of them "normal" and apparently healthy lives and others lives which are "mentally disturbed."… Normal and disturbed gather in the "family group" therapeutic sessions which take place in a wing of the large general neighborhood hospital….

The figure connecting the normal with the mentally disturbed is Charlotte (or Lottie) Taylor, who combines in herself both….

Mr. Schuyler's characters speak exactly as one would expect them to do in "real life," except that what they say seems to have been edited, cut, and selected with the wit of a Ronald Firbank who has slanted his art toward naturalism.

Perhaps the reason why one feels that one knows [the people in the novel] so well is that Mr. Schuyler refrains from passing judgment on...