A good novel should have, so the dictum goes, depths, and Kroetsch's Badlands is suitably multidimensional. The bulk of the action tells the story of William Dawe, a domineering, hunchbacked man who abandons his family in Ontario and sets out on an ambitious journey on a flatboat down the Red Deer River into the Badlands of Alberta. In search of dinosaur bones, Dawe dreams of scientific fame, hopes to take up where his predecessors, eminent paleontologists, left off, hopes in fact to surpass their efforts by uncovering a perfect and unique specimen….

There are at least three overt levels of meaning in the book, all of which work at once and reinforce each other: the main action as it unfolds; Dawe's brief and often misleading entries in his notebooks; and summaries of events, based on these notes, made many years later by Dawe's daughter…. With the latter concern...