[The Pilgrim Hawk] is less the "love story" its subtitle suggests than a fable, and it shows again, but more explicitly and with greater critical weight, [Wescott's] natural inclination toward symbolic and legendary values in narrative. Where once—in The Apple of the Eye, The Grandmothers, and Goodbye, Wisconsin—he elaborated the mythic clues of the pastoral and folk tale, the tribal ritual of the family photograph album or the local daemon that haunts the hearsay, superstitions, and country legends of his midwestern homeland, he here reverts to a time and place grown more fabulous than Wisconsin ever could—to the France of the expatriates after the First World War, a lost paradise removed to lunar distance by war and change, whose delusions of emancipation linger in the memory with the unreality of life on another planet. (p. 304)

Mr. Wescott's story is one of the remarkable works of...