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Chamber Music By Doris Grumbach Dutton, 213 pp., $8.95 Miss Grumbach—who has a deserved reputation for incisive reviewing and for (sometimes indiscriminately) ferreting out unrecognized writers published by the small presses—takes a dab at fiction here. (She has published two previous novels.) Because Chamber Music is in the form of memoirs written by the ninety-year-old widow of an

American composer, presumably one is expected to excuse such lapses as purple prose, skeletal dialogue, extended summarization instead of immediacy, and shallow characterization. Nuance, surprise, depth are not part of this game.

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David Evanier

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Chamber Music By Doris Grumbach Dutton, 213 pp., $8.95 Miss Grumbach—who has a deserved reputation for incisive reviewing and for (sometimes indiscriminately) ferreting out unrecognized writers published by the small presses—takes a dab at fiction here. (She has published two previous novels.) Because Chamber Music is in the form of memoirs written by the ninety-year-old widow of an

American composer, presumably one is expected to excuse such lapses as purple prose, skeletal dialogue, extended summarization instead of immediacy, and shallow characterization. Nuance, surprise, depth are not part of this game.