SOURCE: “The Italian Underbelly,” in Times Literary Supplement, January 27, 1995, p. 22.

In the following review, Keates offers a positive assessment of Mimi's Ghost.

Most modern English fiction with an Italian setting has tended to opt for Tuscany or Umbria to furnish suitable backdrops, confident that décor and a few authenticating allusions to works of art and the bloodier vicissitudes of medieval history will do the trick when localizing detail is required. Few of the novelists who use this Chianti-and-frescos formula have ever actually spent long periods in Italy themselves, or sought to investigate the infrastructure of social ritual and traditional prejudice underlying Italian life, let alone absorb the rhythms of daily existence which their presence as tourists scarcely disturbs.

That Tim Parks, so far from being a tourist, had become almost an honorary Italian, was evident from his Italian Neighbors (1992), the shrewdest of engagements with the subtleties of...