The adjectives lyrical and poetic have often been applied to William Goyen's first novel, The House of Breath. They are not so misleading as most critical cachets because Goyen is a singer whose prose keeps time to the mysterious inner music of his characters.

Whether so much lyricism is a virtue, however, is another matter. I don't believe finally that it is. Being skeptical of epiphanies in general, I get annoyed with someone like young Ganchion, the narrator, who has one on every page. "Spit it out, boy," I keep thinking, "Say it straight." Instead, he trills it out in long plaintive songs about family tragedies and homesickness and some terrible yet ineffable loss of innocence that has transformed him into an Ishmael. Even when we acknowledge that the past is a foreign country and the flutterings of memory difficult to capture, Goyen's prose is frequently so convoluted...