"The Track of the Cat" is one of the great American novels of "place." Something of its nobility should be suggested by the fact that one cannot bring to mind a similar novel of its kind that is quite worthy of comparison. One thinks of the best in the genre, even of such works as Elizabeth Madox Roberts' "The Time of Man" and Willa Cather's "My Antonia," and they come to seem, by comparison, more than ever like miniature studies of special manners, more than graceful surely, yet without grandeur. Mr. Clark's new novel likewise transcends his own earlier books, being larger in scope than his tight drama of a lynching, "The Ox-Bow Incident," and more controlled than the loosely constructed, personal chronicle, "The City of Trembling Leaves." "The Track of the Cat" may well be the achievement that twentieth-century American regionalism has needed to justify itself….

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