Hugh Hood's style, including diction, characterization, symbolism, and tone, is very difficult to deal with in a general way. He is a very eclectic stylist and he does not seem to pay much attention to whether or not various techniques are actually suited to each other or mesh together—especially in the first two novels of The New Age. Since, for one thing, he is interested in ways of knowing various dimensions of reality, he incorporates the vocabularies and styles of different approaches to reality…. [The] reader is apt to run into lists of names of places and things which are given for their own sake. Along with this "Eaton's catalogue" style one also finds a journalistic recording of historical events as well as a listing of scientific data and theories, rules of games, features of old automobiles, and opinions on various and sundry local and global problems...