Jack Hodgins is an author whose mind has an innocent eye. You might say that it launders everything that comes into view. The world it sees is one we're familiar with—full of fears, ambitions, sicknesses, oppressions, obsessions, degradations, tragedies, and disasters—but we see them from that distance innocence keeps—must keep—if it is to remain unadulterated by any head-on reactions to the evils around us….

The information Hodgins gathers from his universe is different absolutely from the kind gleaned by [Zola, Dreiser, or even Dickens]. We are not far into The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne before we begin to understand that Bourne's world requires artlessness and naiveté if it is to be created at all, because it is a world that is fey and magic, where … people do what they must to support that wishful picturing of life that belongs to an only-slightly-beleagured innocent eye...