Paul Bowles stages his impressive novels in a climate of violence and pervading sentient awareness. The atmosphere in which his characters move and have their being is arid and parched, nourished by no springs of feeling or sentiment, relentless and neutral as the shifting yet ineluctable sands always just beyond the city.

The impact of this experience on a disintegrating Western mind has served as subject for Bowles' very special fiction…. Now with [Let It Come Down], Bowles has again set out to explore the patterns of moral decline.

Let It Come Down opens with great promise. The focus of interest is Nelson Dyar, a young American of commonplace proportions, who has come to the Moroccan city of Tangier seeking relief from the burden of his desolate life in a New York bank….

[His] public disintegration is rapid and sensational, but no more so than his private dissolution...