Although the books of Conrad Richter tend to dwell on the past, there is a deceptive timeliness about much of this author's fiction, a tone of what might be called fashionable nostalgia. Each generation craves something different from the past, qualities the generation both lacks and misses. In his best work … Mr. Richter has afforded his readers the vicarious sense of heroism they long for without employing the pat heroics they have been schooled to suspect. His secret has been a style perfectly suited to his semi-legendary material: at once mannered and sensuous, lush yet restrained, so that inherently pompous or sentimental effects are just saved from becoming so by his instinct for severely relevant detail.

In "The Waters of Kronos" … Mr. Richter has once again attempted to infuse a highly nostalgic theme with dignity. John Donner, at the end of a long and successful life in the West, returns to Unionville, the Eastern mining town where he was born. He knows that his home valley has been inundated to make a hydro-electric station, but feels that if he can just be near what once was Unionville before he dies, he will find the answers to two haunting questions: whether he is his father's son; and whose face it was that, night after night, terrified him in the dreams of his boyhood….

Donner stumbles on proof that he is, indeed, of his father's flesh and blood. And just before his actual death, when dream and reality must fuse, he looks in a mirror and realizes that the face in his childhood nightmares was not his father's, as he had suspected, but his own: the spectre of his future self, "marked with the inescapable dissolution and decay of his youth." Convinced that the "son-father-hate legend" is falsehood, he feels that he has exorcized the very root of fear and is free to die in peace. (p. 4)

Mr. Richter's device for mingling Time is successful; it is unfortunate that the revelation for which his portentous prose and insistent symbolism have prepared us seems disappointing. To challenge Freud's theories about the Oedipus complex may be a worthy objective, but it doesn't belong to the realm of fictionalized revelation. Mr. Richter's style and method are still perfectly matched, but neither one suits his message. In attempting to dramatize what he took to be a universal truth, he has made the mistake of employing fantasy to expound a private argument. (p. 5)