In all of Clark's fiction his exceptionally acute observations of outdoor sound, light, smell, mass, texture and relationship are superior to his understanding of the human psyche in any but a decivilised area of operation. There is no living American writer of fiction who can type a richer page of landscape but no writer of equal talent is more endangered by the inability to enrich his human types. The Man on Clark's natural stage is never sufficiently conscious of his position to turn that position into one of tragedy. Curt, in The Track of the Cat, is almost an exception, but it seems to me we do not intimately understand him so much as we pity him, and we are spellbound by the absorbing depersonalized emotions of the hunt fracturing into fear and superstition. Clark's genius in this novel lay in his dramatic and symbolic disposition of forces...