While sexuality is always present in the subtext (another Jamesian quality), it never tips over into action. This is a book in which so simple an event as Eddie's holding the wrong girl's hand at a movie can have traumatic significance; there is no need to go farther. I can only think that Bowen's misdirection is deliberate. In the course of waiting for something to happen, the reader finds that he has absorbed countless details and impressions of everyday life that, taken cumulatively, have an even more devastating effect. This book is like a timed-release drug capsule; you may feel comparatively little after you have finished reading it, but it continues to work in the mind long after you have put it down.

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