SOURCE: Maitland, Sara. “Small Worlds.” New Statesman 112, no. 2892 (29 August 1986): 25.

In the following excerpt, Maitland examines the weaknesses of Monkeys, noting that the novel lacks substance.

Perhaps I am getting old; surely when I started reviewing, ‘first novels’ meant a wrestling match with cosmic themes, images and politics—too often loosely written and formally over-ambitious? Judging from the dozen I have just finished reading, times have changed. First novels now are elegantly crafted, dedicatedly edited, finely written things—unfortunately they are not about anything.

Take Susan Minot's Monkeys, for example: through a series of vignettes, the novel tells of the growing-up of a large, rich middle-class American family in the Sixties and Seventies: the children start boisterous and charming and end up boisterous and less charming; their distant father takes to drink, they to sex and drugs and their vivacious loving mother gets killed in an accident. Each of...