In his first novel, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Higgins established the basis of his distinctive approach to fiction: an artfully authentic reproduction of the lives, views, and language of his proletarian characters.

It was, perhaps, the last element—the use of vernacular speech (dialogue, but more often monologue) to carry the narrative— which led critics to praise him and which has earned him comparisons to Mark Twain and Ring Lardner. Higgins has endorsed the motto: "Dialogue is character is plot." The motto's priorities are certainly those of Higgins's art of fiction. The judgment ofDeke Hunter (1976) is probably his purest achievement in this respect.

Wonderful Years, Wonderful Years illustrates the ease with which Higgins now handles this art of narration through dialogue. The voices of the characters, with their hesitations and elisions, sound authentic, and they also serve to make the narrative radically subjective: Almost all...