I picked up Kay Boyle's Avalanche in the hope of finding a novel worth reading, and have been somewhat taken aback to get nothing but a piece of pure rubbish.

Aside from a few literary devices such as italicized "interior monologues," Avalanche is simply the usual kind of thing that is turned out by women writers for the popular magazines. (p. 128)

I have heard Miss Boyle praised as a stylist, but, though there are in Avalanche a few fine images and gray and white mountain landscapes, I cannot see how a writer with a really sound sense of style could have produced this book even as a potboiler. One recognizes the idiom of a feminized Hemingway: "There was one winter when the blizzard got us part way up … If you looked in the direction the wind was coming from, your breath stopped suddenly as if someone took you...