The most important decision that a writer must make is probably not the decision about subject. It is the decision about scale…. Scale, in this sense, is the measure of a writer's seriousness. Also, of his ambition, which in the best instances consists in a shocking belief in the possibility of greatness. (p. 38)

[A Late Divorce] is, in its subject and its scale, a large novel. [Yehoshua's] subject is the fate of a family, or more precisely, the family as the instrument of fate. Rarely have the crippling consequences of the extraordinary closeness in which all lives begin, the banal derailments of fathers and mothers and sons and daughters and sisters and brothers and husbands and wives by one another, been captured with this much wisdom. (pp. 38-9)

The story of the mortification of the Kaminkas is told by Yehoshua in a brilliant series of monologues…. [His characters...