The Remains of the Day is a critical and commercial success. Reviewers' glowing notices of the novel praise its characterization, language, tone, and thematic content. Lawrence Graver of the New York Times Book Review calls the novel "a dream of a book: a beguiling comedy of manners that evolves almost magically into a profound and heart-rending study of personality, class, and culture." In a review for London's Observer, noted author Salman Rushdie praises the novel for its ability to simultaneously present surface understatement and tremendous underlying tension. In the Christian Science Monitor, critic Merle Rubin declares, "Delicate, devastating, thoroughly ironic, yet never harsh, this is a novel whose technical achievements are matched by its insightfulness." David Gurewich of New Criterion deems the novel a "remarkable" book in which "the pitch is perfect." Commenting on the comic tradition of butlers in English literature, Hermione Lee of New...