SOURCE: Solomon, Andy. “Susan Minot Depicts a Bostonian's Petrified Passions.” Chicago Tribune Books (18 October 1992): 3.

In the following review, Solomon praises the characterization, narrative tension, and successful evocation of setting in Folly.

When Susan Minot's debut novel-in-vignettes, Monkeys, appeared six years ago, critics compared its then under-30 author to Salinger, Faulkner, John Irving, Evelyn Waugh, Updike, Virginia Woolf and Louise Erdrich. All this on the basis of 159 pages. Now, after the slight step backward of her bleak 1989 collection Lust and Other Stories, Minot offers her first organically unified novel [Folly]. It is dazzling.

The surface of Folly feels serene enough, for serenity is a dominant force contending for the heart of its heroine. Coming of age in Boston during World War I, Lilian Eliot lives in an affluent, insular world, where people put “their feelings in one hidden place and the rest of themselves out in life.” Mothers won't...