SOURCE: “Embracing Lunacy,” in Times Literary Supplement, May 26–June 1, 1989, p. 592.

In the following review, Reading offers a favorable evaluation of Family Planning.

Frank Baldwin has retired from his job as site-manager for a construction company after years of occupational globe-trotting. He and his wife Brenda are flying home from his last assignment in Algiers to their neglected property on the Lancashire coast, where they intend to settle. With them is their son Raymond. But something is amiss. “Smiling and as if addressing a tiny child, she held a finger over her lips in the direction of this hefty young man her eldest son.” Raymond is a maniac.

Tim Parks's ironically titled new novel Family Planning, as well as demonstrating the futility and wrong-headedness of complacent expectation, nags at the conscience concerning responsibility—of the individual, the family and the State. As the plot unfolds (straightforward narrative alternates with...