[The one unfailing link that joins The Big Sky, The Way West, These Thousand Hills, Arfive and The Lost Valley] is Guthrie's insistent use of the Western landscape as the distinguishing mark of the West, as the very heart and soul and body of whatever the West means. All the complexities and contradictions of the Western experience are finally seen in and judged by the interaction of characters and the landscape—that landscape which includes the earth, sky, space. And just as the idea of the West includes an enormous variety of ingredients, often paradoxical, so the landscape includes a variety of roles in Guthrie's novels: it may be at one and the same time, or at different times, mistress, friend, deadly foe, victor, victim, deity. Whatever else Guthrie may be doing or not doing, he is not simply sentimentalizing the glories and beauties of the land. Although...