[Tourmaline] is Stow's most intriguing novel. It exhibits a greater imaginative power than his other books, and although not without some stylistic flaws, it shows Stow to be a writer in greater control of his material than he showed himself to be in To the Islands. As in To the Islands, in Tourmaline Stow is expanding his story by means of symbol and myth, but in Tourmaline the blending of the realistic and the mythic is more successful than in the former novel. In terms of language, Stow achieves a greater consistency than in the previous novels. Gone are the frequent quotations and literary allusions, and although there are a few instances of shifts into elevated diction, because of their position in the novel and the voice through which they are recorded, these shifts are not as jarring as similar ones in To the Islands. Perhaps a major...