SOURCE: West, Paul. “The Call of the Wild.” Washington Post Book World 21 (24 February 1991): X6.

In the following review, West criticizes Dream of the Wolf for its monotonous narratives and artless prose, and further comments that Bradfield overdoes his references to commercial brand-names without delving deeply enough into the psyches of his characters.

The word “vision” implies things present to the sense of sight, but also things commonly regarded as beyond this world. A writer like Chaucer deals in the first kind of vision and loses something by eschewing the second; a writer like Blake loses something by eschewing the first while achieving huge increments of the second. Perhaps there is a happy balance between the two, notably in Woolf and Proust, but it seems to be a shifting one peculiar to individual writers.

Nonetheless, since art thrives on contrast, a balance of this kind is good, especially for...