In Vance Bourjaily 's ten novels, spanning nearly fifty years, he has observed with a critical but compassionate eye the devastating impact of World War II on the American psyche, along with the subsequent corrosive force of the cold-war era and its markings of suspicion and paranoia. In the society that Bourjaily describes, the once-nurturing institutions of church and school are emptied of promise, as is the fabled American dream. Alone, misguided, and often exhausted, Bourjaily's protagonists struggle to preserve their humanity in a nation that "seems ... to have used up its citizens' energy -- the only national resource worth calculating -- in too short and bright a flash." This passage from The Hound of Earth (1955) echoes in all his novels, describing the elemental conflict his characters must resolve if they are to survive amid the chaos of the age. His protagonists draw on what inner resources they...