SOURCE: Wood, Michael. “The Art of Losing.” New York Review of Books 46, no. 3 (18 February 1999): 7–10.

In the following excerpt, Wood assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Evening, commenting that the prose in the novel is occasionally “just too casual.”

Scarcely anyone now turns to novels, as so many once did, for direct information about the world. We are more likely to consult memoirs, biographies, histories, interviews, surveys—assuming we go to books at all, and are not already amply briefed by newspapers and radio and film and television, overwhelmed by news, talk shows, phone-ins, gossip columns, and those in-depth investigations which remind us how far down the surface goes. We don't expect novels to tell us the way we live now, in Trollope's phrase: only the way we don't live, or would like to live, or think we live.

There is something wrong with this reasonable proposition, but it's...