SOURCE: "The White Silence of Their Lives," in The New York Times Book Review, September 11, 1988, p. 14.

Sexton is an American novelist, editor, and nonfiction writer. In the following review, she offers a highly positive assessment of Out of This World, praising Swift's focus on family love, betrayal, and alienation, and declaring that his "achievement is that the important story of [his main characters' self-education has been told with such simple, startling beauty."]

To write with passion—but without bathos—about people who mourn is a formidable task. To write simultaneously about individuals who, transcending the burden of the past, reconnect with others and resurrect their own lost selves represents another magnitude of difficulty entirely. Such an undertaking requires talent and courage, and the British novelist Graham Swift demonstrates an ample supply of both in his fifth novel, Out of This World, an evocative portrait of a family once...