SOURCE: "Niagara Falls Gothic," in The New York Times Book Review, March 18, 1990, p. 16.

Disch is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, editor, librettist, and author of books for children. He has also written under the name Leonie Hargrave and the joint pseudonyms Thom Demijohn and Cassandra Kyne. In the following, he provides a negative review of The Whirlpool.

Jane Urquhart's new book, The Whirlpool, is an almost perfect example of the first novel in the common, and pejorative, sense of the term. Of course, there are as many types of first novels as there are types of novels, and the type the Canadian poet Jane Urquhart has aspired to is one of the more modest: a genteel historical novel with Gothic overtones (but nothing overtly or vulgarly horripilating) concerning the inactions of abnormally sensitive individuals. There are three separate strands of plot, which are never braided, and...