SOURCE: “Six Authors in Search of a Hero,” in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXV, 1957, pp. 498-508.

In the following review, West uses Morris's The Field of Vision as a touchstone for evaluating several other novels published contemporaneously with it.

Reading as many as six novels at a time cannot fail to give one a generalized sense of what might be happening to the novel form. When all six are by American authors and when they all appeared within a few months of each other, the impact is likely to be more concentrated and, we might hope, more trustworthy. The impression may be of hope or of disappointment, without regard for the merit or failures of individual works. In the case of the present six books, the impression was distinctly good. There is not a really bad book among them. Some are more limited than others. At least one...