Bill Maxwell also wrote with enthusiasm:

Dear Francis, it’s absolutely marvelous … The effect is of a layer of callous peeled off, leaving something luminous and alive. You can, for the first time, eat the food and touch the people and smell and see everything. And reading it, I am continually reminded that Flaubert was an aesthete, and continually driven to reflect, as Mrs. Woolf was in her novels, “Human life, human life!” It goes on like a refrain behind whatever is happening. It is not like a translation but like a redoing of it in English. The cadences, the diction, the shifting naturalness of the style are all incomparable. And all those glittering effects, as when M. Rouault remembering how his bride rode pillion behind him, looks back and sees that there is nothing on the road. I don’t know why I think Flaubert meant this to mean the total emptying of the past, any more than I know why I think he meant to convey, when Emma is making conversation with Charles and says that she doesn’t enjoy country life, that her destiny is already final and that it is only a matter of a little while and she will have the taste of poison in her mouth. At every point there are these effects, these double-takes, which are new to me, and ravishing. [Harold] Brodkey was so excited he kept groaning for pleasure, and he had read the book twice before and never cared for it. I could paper a room with my favorite passages.