SOURCE: "Mother Casts Her Shadow on Her Young Son's Life," in The New York Times, April 26, 1989, p. C20.

Hoffman is a Polish educator, autobiographer, and editor of The New York Times Book Review. In the following mixed review of Dead Languages, she examines Shields's portrayal of Jeremy Zorn, the protagonist of the novel.

Of course, language has been the obsession and the true subject of many writers; of course, it has been their hard block of Carrara marble as well as their fine chisel, their Protean deceiver as well as the deep well of truth. But rarely has language been as much of a prison house, antagonist and a poison weapon as it is in David Shields's original but unsettling, and finally unsettled, novel [Dead Languages].

Jeremy Zorn, the protagonist and narrator of Dead Languages, is a stutterer, a person sick of language and ill with it, and...