I read The Invention of the World with part of my mind wandering through the world that had seemed so strange to me when I entered it half a life ago—the world of the loggers and their whores and the stump farmers and the Anglo-Irish eccentrics and millenarian communities, and I was delighted with the felicity of observation that had enabled Hodgins to catch so well the look and mood of the wild sea-forest-and-mountain landscape, and the speech and mannerism of its inhabitants. These aspects satisfied my nostalgia and at the same time pleased me with the thought that such a strange and undoubtedly transient world had not gone uncelebrated.

At the same time, I developed reservations about the fictional structure of the book. In the central strand of the plot—the career of Maggie Kyle from logger's moll to proprietor of a trailer park on the...