Walter Clark has come to be known through the years as the essential Western novelist, the one who did perhaps more than anyone else to define (in his fiction) the mode of perception, the acquisition of knowledge, and the style which we tend to call Western…. [His] prose style is imagistic, symbolic (or metaphoric), and direct, tapping the subconscious but staying in touch with the real world. (His style is not unlike that of Harvey Fergusson, but it is more forceful and more frequently evocative, probably because of his stronger concern with a sacred as well as a profane world.) His perception of reality rests heavily on dualities and contrasts, in imagery as well as in characterization, and he assumes that knowledge acquired through the intellect or the conscious mind is, at best, incomplete. He searches for unity, and while the distinctions or contrasts of experience are not...