SOURCE: Fairweather, Natasha. “It May Look Like a Sack of Cement to You. To Me, It's a Dead Sheep.” Observer (19 July 1998): 14.

In the following review, Fairweather considers The Artist's Widow to be a disappointing novel.

At some juncture in her lengthy career as a writer, Shena Mackay must have encountered the publisher's publicist from hell. For in her new novel, The Artist's Widow, Mackay sketches a vicious cameo portrait of Nancy Carmody, the glossy, publicist daughter of a Conservative MP who lost his seat in the 1997 election. More interested in her funeral clothes than the reasons behind the suicide of one of her authors, Nancy is described as a slippery eel while her philandering father is likened to a weevil.

Writing with what reads like personal bitterness, Mackay describes the branch of publishing to which Nancy belongs: ‘All those people with their fat salaries [who] have no conception...