Mary Lee Settle, best known as an historical novelist, is, like most Southern writers since Faulkner, preoccupied with memory. In Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday the shadow of the past falls continually on the present, and the characters move through the half-light like figures in a trance, their speech a long, reminiscent lament. The whole book is a kind of mourning ballad for the futility and tragedy of the South….

[The McKarkles are] a predictable family built for melodrama, and Miss Settle succeeds only fitfully in raising their experience to the level of tragedy. Behind her accent on memory is a determination to find "the key place, the point, the place where a man stopped and pivoted"….

Miss Settle weaves her ballad in an intense, luxuriant style, sometimes choked with adjectives, sometimes drifting into a melancholy singsong….

Inevitably Fight Night on a Sweet Saturday recalls the work...