Newspaper Article

A DENSE BUT LYRICAL TALE OF LOVE, LUST

Reviewed by Alan Cheuse, An author whose books include the novel "The Light Possessed" and the story collection "The Tennessee Waltz".

1994

Overview

The lyrical novel has had its following among 20th Century readers, certainly among the devoted fans of Virginia Woolf and lately in the blossoming readership of Cormac McCarthy, whose prose soars and startles and then swoops close to Earth before darting again toward the stars. Prose poems, the measured prose of poets, have their admirers as well, though it's probably a more select group of devotees. The two forms usually remain quite separate, but in the work of the late Texas writer William Goyen the two seemed to converge in prose tales with all of the resonance and implication of poetry, and prose poems with all of the evocativeness of short fiction. A small but appreciative crowd of readers greeted Goyen's first books, \"House of Breath\" (1950), a meditation on East Texas saints and sinners cast in the form of a novel, and \"Ghost and Flesh,\" his first book of stories that followed soon after.

• Publisher: Tribune Publishing Company, LLC