Hoagland is one of the best "personal essayists" in the business, a virtuoso of the reader-capsizing sentence, a splendid observer of city street, circus lot, go-go girls, freight trains, juries in the jury room plus, and especially, any and every surviving patch of North American wild he can get to moon around in—whether in British Columbia or just beyond his summer acres in Vermont.

But this much expertise, readiness, fluency of information and manner is of course to be expected these days in the magazine business, where so many people now write like a flash and with a flash, smart-smart-smart. There is so much information around, so many "personalities," so much ease of movement, so much eloquent bitterness, that as the magazines get fewer and thinner, the writing gets "better"—or at least more upsetting, more concentrated, more outdoing…. Only fiction writers now seem capable of satisfying...