[Wallant] achieves the dramatic by skirting the melodramatic; his characters tend to be drawn in outline or reduced to a few essential traits; his symbolism tends to be simple and straightforward, if not obvious;… these aforementioned characteristics help to describe him as an American naturalist in the tradition of Dreiser and Norris…. [He] was interested in the difference between appearances and reality, and philosophically he was a meliorist determinist. Like the subjects that concerned the turn-of-the-century American naturalists, his subjects are contemporary social and personal problems; similarly, his characters live on the lower fringes of bourgeois society but are often distinguished by a certain native nobility, and his melodramatic stories are replete with violent death and gross sex. Also like some of the earlier American naturalists, Wallant incorporates symbolic and mythic elements into his novels. But the last novel written before his premature death, The Tenants of Moonbloom...