SOURCE: Griffith, Michael. “‘All of Us Dislike the Laws of Nature’: New Fiction in Review.” Southern Review 31, no. 2 (April 1995): 365-80.

In the following excerpt, Griffith offers a positive review of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?, commending Moore's deft characterization and comic wit.

In a way, all of us dislike the laws of nature. We should prefer to make things happen in the more direct way in which savage people imagine them to happen, through our own invocation.

—Robert Parrish, The Magician's Handbook, quoted in Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods

I, too, dislike it: but natural law is always there, ready—like a bunched rug, a stray skate—to trip those who forget their feet. No tread can be light enough. As Dueña Alfonsa puts it to the mooning John Grady in Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses, “[W]e all come to be...