[Miss Gordon] is a conscious heiress to what is probably the central tradition of modern fiction, which we can refer to, following some of its great practitioners, as the Impressionist novel…. Miss Gordon is more than the follower of a tradition; indeed, her innovations are bold and far-reaching. But she often works out her devices with an eye on the masters whom she honors. (pp. 279-80)

Her method, if we may call it that, consists in subtly adjusting her prose medium to her subject. If she were a Renaissance poet we would say that she obeys the ancient rhetorical principle of decorum, with the several styles adapted to the levels of subject. And indeed the old term is being revived today, notably by the most astute students of Joyce, who in Ulysses systematically exploits the possibilities of multiple style. Miss Gordon, however, does not plunge from one style to another; we might say she modulates the tone from a fixed position within each novel or story. (p. 281)

Penhally is a completely "rendered" novel, as [Ford Maddox Ford] would have said. Its method of presentation—the shifting post of observation in the line of succession among the Llewellyns—allows a remarkable degree of control for such a large subject. Its author has seldom written better. But she was not content with the perfection of a method, and her subsequent books have realized her subject by a variety of means. Her second novel, Aleck Maury, Sportsman (1934), for instance, is based on the convention of the old-fashioned memoir. Aleck Maury is the only one of her major characters whom Miss Gordon has granted the privilege of telling his own story, and she thus departs from what with her is a virtual principle. This, the most popular of her novels, can stand by itself, but it gains something from those written after it, as though it were cutting across a territory whose outlines are more fully revealed later on. Many readers are familiar with the Aleck Maury stories which group themselves round the novel ("Old Red" for instance frequently appears in anthologies) and so I shall point to only one leading feature of the book. Aleck Maury is of course the sportsman par excellence, and his book can be enjoyed simply as something pleasurable, like The Compleat Angler. But the author has deftly complicated things by introducing the image of Aeneas, fleeing the ruins of Troy with his decrepit father on his back. Aleck himself is a Virginian, the son of a Latinist who undertakes his boy's education by teaching him to read the Aeneid. The image is occasionally alluded to later in the book, but never insisted upon…. [It] suggests that Aleck himself is an Aeneas, who will leave the ruins of his father's house, but not under the aegis of any Venus who will guide him to another Troy. He has only the memory of a civilization to perpetuate. Dispossessed almost from the start, he is thrown back upon his sportsman's instincts for survival. (pp. 283-84)

[None Shall Look Back and The Garden of Adonis] complement each other in various ways. Both deal with the break-up of a family estate, and apparently the same family, the Allards, at different periods in their history. These are longer and more ambitious than her first two books, and they pose certain problems of structure and meaning. None Shall Look Back has for its model nothing less than War and Peace. In adapting her practice to the subject of some magnitude, she has had to use an economy of rendition in order to compose larger scenes than she tried to manage in her first books, and at times one can scarcely believe that None Shall Look Back was written by the same person who wrote Penhally. Like Tolstoy, she has written a novel of war and peace which has seemed to some readers to fall into its component parts. She has, to start with, taken a Kentucky family, the Allards, with their various connections, through the vicissitudes of the Civil War. Under the impact of the war their fortunes undergo a decline; they are almost ruined; in the end we know they will somehow survive. But the novel is also about the war in its Western theater. We follow not only members of the Allard family, but the highest officers of the Confederate and Federal forces as they direct the operations. The war exists as something beyond any individual's comprehension of it, an enveloping action; everyone's destiny is shaped by it; no one escapes. The problem is to relate the two levels of action. Miss Gordon does this by having the young soldier Rives Allard, who now is in love with his adversary Death, shot from his horse. The author quickly takes the point of view from Rives to Bedford Forrest, a procedure which would ordinarily violate the structure of a scene. As Rives dies and falls to the ground, he becomes merely a "body" which the fleeing infantry must avoid in their rush. But Forrest sees the body, he recognizes it; then, as though there were a continuum of consciousness between the dead man and his commander, the focus moves entirely to Forrest, for the first and only time in the novel. Rives' tragedy is caught up in the larger action of which Forrest is the representative. This austere and remote figure participates in the pathos and is thus humanized…. The effect Miss Gordon gets is tragic, and it has been well prepared for. And this is the only one of her novels in which the tragic movement is complete.

The Garden of Adonis deals with four families, including the Allards, during the economic depression of the 1930's. This is Miss Gordon's "Agrarian" novel. Although the author solves the main structural problem by a shifting point of view, there is no true center of action as there is in None Shall Look Back; it is as though so much centrifugal energy proceeds from a source impossible to locate. The patriarch Mister Ben Allard is still the master of his property, but he is at the mercy of bankers, storekeepers, a falling tobacco market, and other forces almost beyond control…. This novel, though on occasion brilliant, suffers from long stretches of banality. Miss Gordon has been only too honest in presenting certain characters in their own idiom and at their own evaluation; ironically one of these is Mister Ben's daughter. The machine is at the center of her consciousness, and for pages at a time the effect is close to advertising copy. Her father, unlike the earlier patriarchs, is ineffectual, and his idiom no longer commands respect. Perhaps realizing this, Miss Gordon relies on the myth of Adonis—referred to in the title and derived from Sir James Frazer—to give depth to her situation. But this does not happen; the myth remains external to the action. (pp. 284-86)

The five novels which culminate in Green Centuries have much in common. With the exception of Aleck Maury, Sportsman, they exhibit a consistent movement towards tragedy, although only None Shall Look Back fulfills the movement. And the novels are conceived in a kind of grand design against the enveloping action of history. With these five books behind her, Miss Gordon had the choice of "filling out" her subject, perhaps using some of the characters she had already invented, or else of extending it by moving to another post of observation. Her second group of novels—The Women on the Porch (1944), The Strange Children (1951), and The Malefactors (1956)—does both. These books are set against the history of the South, like their predecessors, but only indirectly. And their mode is finally Christian comedy. About the time that she published The Women on the Porch Miss Gordon was beginning to doubt whether a "regional" literature in the South would continue much longer; it was her opinion that the renaissance in letters was coming to its end. Probably with some such feeling about her subject she has steadily widened its reference. (p. 287)

With the complexity of subject has come a new boldness of technique. These novels are more Jamesian than the earlier ones—the point of view is more strictly controlled—but they also draw extensively on the resources of poetry, such as The Waste Land, which lies back of The Women on the Porch, and Dante's Purgatorio, which informs The Malefactors to some extent. (pp. 287-88)

[We] should not assume that [Gordon] has been the virtuoso. On the contrary, her stylistic shifts are an index to the scale of her work. Her eight novels and her stories and even her critical essays compose a genuine oeuvre. Using the materials accessible to her (her own life, the history of her family, the history of her region), she has built up an impressive image of Western man and the crisis which his restlessness has created. We can see one instance of this restlessness in Rion Outlaw and his dream of infinite space. But there are scarcely any institutional forms to restrain him. Chapman, the sophisticated historian in The Women on the Porch, is the latest version of Rion Outlaw, and his dream of infinite space is a nightmare. Nearly all of Miss Gordon's heroes are aware of the general plight, but Chapman and Stephen Lewis and Tom Claiborne are intensely conscious of a failing in their lives, and their meditations take the form of an interior drama.

Most of Miss Gordon's heroes (and many of her heroines) are fleeing from some kind of historical ruin—the exceptions are old Nicholas Llewellyn and Fontaine Allard and even Mister Ben Allard in The Garden of Adonis, but even these patriarchs cannot check the forces of disruption very long. Miss Gordon seems to be saying that it was a mistake to make such an absolute commitment to the order of history. Aleck Maury perhaps understands this failure, and as classicist and sportsman he can still act the Aeneas who will never found another Troy. But even the sportsman's instinct for ritual as a barrier against the ruins of time cannot be counted on, and Jim Carter, a flawed sportsman—hero in The Garden of Adonis, hardly even makes the attempt. In The Strange Children we see the futility (or at least the irony) of the effort to perpetuate a history already ruined. Here and even more in The Malefactors Miss Gordon is saying that redemption must lie in another order of existence, and of course she finally makes no secret of her Christian emphasis. But the ruin is easier to dramatize than the act of redemption.

If the imagery of flight permeates her books, what is the counter-image, the emblem of stasis, even of fulfillment? That is a natural image which most frequently takes the form of a tree. (Like Yeats she seems to arrive at this image very easily.) Perhaps the most "typical" moments in Miss Gordon's fiction occur when her heroes step out of time, as it were, and contemplate the forest. There is the moment when young John Llewellyn, shot from his horse at Shiloh, watches a young maple leaf floating through the center of the destruction. Or there is Mister Ben Allard sitting under his favorite sugar tree and dreaming of his dead sweetheart. In The Malefactors the symbol of the natural order becomes more than that: Claiborne "stared at the copper beech tree as if he could find the answer there," and "he had felt that those dusky boughs harbored Presences." No other American writer has so patiently described the surfaces of trees, even the striations of leaves, or made so much of them. The tree as an image of "wholeness" yields a meaning to him who contemplates it lovingly, Miss Gordon seems to say, and the moment of stasis can perhaps be an intimation of something divine. The tragedy of historical ruin could be redeemed—so the movement from Penhally to The Malefactors suggests. (pp. 288-89)

[Miss Gordon] has tried to use the full resources of a tradition to create an enduring fictional illusion. She has been more conscious of her rôle than some other novelists. Did she choose wisely in associating herself with the masters of the Impressionist tradition? Their successes have been hard-won. The effort to achieve a fully realized illusion in the manner of Flaubert or James or Ford is always being threatened by the indifferent or the restless. (pp. 289-90)

Miss Gordon and several of her contemporaries carry on the tradition of the Impressionist masters, which still assumes that a public reality is accessible to a private vision. No one can say what this tradition will finally come to represent, but for the moment one can applaud Miss Gordon for her devotion to her chosen mission; her place in the line of succession should be secure, and one says this knowing that her career is not finished. Her desire for excellence has been an admirable thing. (p. 290)