[Plains Song is] as solid and clever a piece of work as [Morris has] produced in the last twenty years since Ceremony In Lone Tree…. Morris is a tease, is both fond of his people, of their circumstances, and appalled by them; as in Empsonian pastoral, in one way he's better—at least smarter—than they are, but in another way not so good.

This doubleness plays around under a perfectly cool surface on which the deadpan narrator operates…. Morris' vice has always been, both in his fiction and his essays, a tendency toward whimsy and superciliousness, indulged in this book by asking too many of these rhetorical questions no character could ever have asked. It means that at such moments the narrator becomes a bit too much The Humorist, winking out at us from behind his characters' skirts, or whatever appropriate garments they may be wearing. This...