SOURCE: "Sons and Fathers," in The New Republic, Vol. 206, No. 25, June 22, 1992, pp. 38-40.

In the following review of Ever After, Levenson discusses the novel's focus on academia, its nationalistic outlook, and its thematic relation to Swift's other novels.

How could any comment more sharply irritate Graham Swift than the cruelly recurrent, dully obvious opinion that neither his two novels written before Waterland (1983) nor the two written since even belong on the same shelf as that strong book? But so it is. Swift is only 42—only, let us say, halfway there—and, smart and conscious as he is, he must sometimes face the thought that his career is building to a point where it will either recede into the plodding of the minor novelist or leap again into the upper air while all our craning necks turn to follow.

The publication of Waterland sent out a gusty wind of...