The extraordinary richness of [A Hall of Mirrors] lies not so much in the plot as in the wonderfully drawn secondary characters, all on the margin of society and mostly on the outer edge of sanity. This gallery of grotesques does not strike the reader as being made up of arbitrary creations of a bookish imagination. They are social and psychological types that tell us a great deal about the real world of America. The crowning achievement is the character of Geraldine, ignorant, not pretty, and not smart, but so decent and womanly that the reader is powerfully drawn to her. Something very unusual is going on in this novel: the author's own encounter with life.

The unspoken theme of A Hall of Mirrors is the relation between the prosperous official society and its necessary underworld of drop-outs and cast-offs. These parallel systems meet in the persons of...