["The Witch Diggers"] is a good, long, warm, generous and curious novel. Its detail rounded and rich, an enormous number of vigorous characters abounding, it is a physical panorama concerned morally with man's infatuation with plans and calculations, from the noblest of them to the maddest and most useless and hopeless, and how this infatuation distorts, ruthlessly opposes, and even dooms his powers of love….

The title refers specifically to a brother and sister, inmates of the Poor Farm, who believe that the truth is something as actual and literal as a piece of paper, actually and literally buried in the ground somewhere, to be unearthed by diggers if they dig long enough, then to set mankind free. A curious splendor is in these witch diggers, maddening and infectious.

This novel about love, responsibility, fate, is presented in a physical world of earthly beauty and ugliness, of vigor...