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Now that I'm two books in, the Frederica Potter novels are shaping up to be an interesting comparison piece, and a more female-centered counterbalance, for Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, which I read last year and absolutely loved. Perhaps John Updike's Rabbit books make for a closer comparison structurally, also being a quartet with one appearing in each of four consecutive decades, and Byatt also makes reference to In Search of Lost Time fairly liberally throughout Still Life.

Whatever the case, Still Life really is excellent, and for my money a small step up from its predecessor The Virgin in the Garden. It's very dense, but never difficult, and although it wears its intellectual credentials on its sleeve, it gets away with it by doing so defiantly rather than smugly.

The only element that didn't work for me, and for which I have reluctantly lowered my overall rating, is the occasional direct interruption by the author to underscore certain key moments or veer into protracted digressions about art, literature, and philosophy of language. When these subjects are worked into the dialogue, or a character's inner monologue, I enjoy them very much (as in Possession, and indeed in most of this), but one gets the sense that rather than try to crowbar every thought and observation into the body of a novel, perhaps the author should also have written a small volume of essays at the same time. This is, however, a relatively minor blemish on the surface of an otherwise terrific novel which bodes well for the rest of the cycle.