Her restraint calls to mind the great Mavis Gallant, who also put a huge amount of trust in her reader (and was also darkly funny). Like a writer in complete control of her talent, Winter trusts the reader to understand.
I worry that all this talk of Catholicism and saints might put some readers off, but truly, this is a secular book, and Winter’s greatest accomplishment is that she takes on enormous, highly charged topics - faith, the right to choose, female identity - and presents a story without one shred of moralizing. Alongside zoomed-in scenes like these, Winter finds subtle ways to remind the reader of the larger world. Jessica Winter's The Fourth Child is a brave, complex novel about a mother and her two daughtersand a morally astute exploration of the rewards, limits, and unexpected costs of faith and compassion. The details of a back-of-the-school-bus encounter between a group of Lauren’s classmates around the year 1990 felt lifted from my own 1990 and I had to put the book down for a moment. In the areas of growing awareness of one’s own sexuality, how social power is brokered, how belief systems are formed, Winter is a genius. The novel is structured around Jane’s and Lauren’s points of view, and through them, over a span of nearly 20 years, we get a vivid portrait of female coming-of-age. There is something so authentic about Jane, something so completely opposite of cunning, that it’s impossible not to feel for her even though you know she’s doing pretty much everything wrong.
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