To get to the point at once, with a bluntness that I hope contains an element of mercy; The Last Valley, A. B. Guthrie's fifth and, he says, probably final novel about America's westering, is a near-total disaster as a work of fiction. (It is an extremely interesting sociological document, however, a point to which I shall return in a moment.) One can scarcely believe that the man who wrote The Big Sky and The Way West is responsible for it.

Guthrie seems to have forgotten everything he once so splendidly knew about craft, form, function, and the vagaries of the human heart; every page, every line, almost every sentence treats us to an unhappy spectacle of ineptitude, not unlike watching a man attempting to hack a tree stump into a piano with a dull ax. Mark Twain once wrote that if there are to be both corpses...