SOURCE: Bell, Pearl K. “Fiction Chronicle.” Partisan Review 40, no. 1 (winter 1993): 63–77.

In the following excerpt, Bell offers a mixed assessment of Folly, praising Minot's virtuosity, but finding fault with the novel's circumscribed milieu and idiom.

Somewhere in his journals, George Orwell recalls a packet of books he was once asked to review for a London weekly. One was a novel set in Indochina, the other a study of eighteenth-century British agriculture, and in a covering note the editor had written: “These should go well together.” A donnish joke, and probably apocryphal, but the anecdote comes to mind whenever I must pick and choose for a column about recent fiction. Do the eight novels discussed here “go well together”? Is there any reason why they should? There is such diversity and variety among novelists today that any large generalization seems arbitrary and suspect.

Why were these eight novels selected from...