[The pattern of "The Studhorse Man"] is circular, as is Hazard's journey, and the point—made in a manner that fuses prairie tall-tale with Odyssean myth—is that perfectionists procrastinate and thus waste their lives while life in general goes muddling on around them. In the long run, Poseidon tramples Hazard to death … and the narrator goes off his head, the strain of "knowing" Hazard and of trying to tell the truth about him having proved too great.

There's a certain amount of strain for the reader too, especially if he always wants to know exactly what's going on; but if he can resist, at least as often as the narrator does, what the narrator calls "the necessity of interpretation," he will have a ball as Mr. Kroetsch's gross hero stalks with his prize beast through a landscape as abstract as it is lovingly delineated, as crammed with...