Alive in William Goyen is a primal affinity with the first things of creation…. He has the keen senses of the woodsman, whom no creak or rustle can elude. He registers the sensual qualities of natural things, and it is as though he himself had experienced, from within, the cycle of germination, budding, flowering, and withering of all created matter. We seem to be hearing the voice of an aboriginal American that is being constantly pushed back by industrial civilization and forced to languish in its big cities. (p. 458)

[House of Breath is a] fledgling work—but a mature one. We are accustomed to a first novel being an eruption on which ore, slag, and ashes are whirled up together; or a so-called confession; or the reaction to the shock of growing pains on the nerves. Goyen's art is of a different sort. He has pledged himself to...