SOURCE: “‘So Distinct a Shade’: Shirley Ann Grau's Evidence of Love,” in Southern Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, January, 1978, pp. 195-98.

In the following essay, Rohrberger explores the psychological world of Grau's characters.

Evidence of Love, Shirley Ann Grau's fifth novel, is told through the viewpoint of three characters. Words spoken by Edward Milton Henley begin and end the novel. The middle sections are spoken by Henley's son, Stephen, and by Stephen's wife, Lucy. Grau uses a similar point of view in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hard Blue Sky (1958) and in The Condor Passes (1971). But whereas the earlier novels are tied to place and time, Evidence of Love operates like much contemporary fiction on a plane where space and time are intrareferential, turning back on themselves. In addition, though we hear voices and through them a story is told, the meaning of the novel derives not so much from the...