To a greater degree than even he would perhaps admit, the content and technique of Kiely's fiction are dictated by a voice out of the past….

For more than thirty years Kiely has stood with one foot in the past and the other in the present, mingling joys and disappointments of the two worlds, and, so postured, he has managed to create a fiction that is more than credible; it is convincing. (p. 24)

He is symbolist, allegorist, and myth maker, and his fiction employs ambiguity, paradox, irony, satire—whatever device serves to heighten involvement at the moment. His writing is influenced by naturalism and existentialism on the Continent and by the psychological novelists of Britain and the United States. He might have been a realist, a naturalist, some sort of avant-garde experimentalist, but he has too much imagination to be any of those. Surely he is one of...