Put baldly, the plan of [The Oysters of Locmariaquer] is a disquisition on the oysters of this region, the people who cultivate them, the people who used to cultivate them, the beliefs and customs of the place, the whole suffering and joy of Locmariaquer whether above or below the surface of the tidal waters. (p. 23)

One reads on, page after page, never quite sure what will come next. An occasional slight irritation at Miss Clark's manner of writing, which too frequently descends into the coy and the cosy, is allayed by a sense of confidence in the shape of the whole thing. (Miss Clark isn't, for my money, a reliably good writer sentence by sentence—though she often strikes out admirably evocative phrases—but chapter by chapter her gift of construction is unfailing.) And always, there at the bottom of it, is the oyster…. Yes, The Oysters of Locmariaquer is interesting and agreeable if one simply takes it on the simplest level, as a good read with plenty of information and some excellent anecdotes studded in at well-planned intervals. But it has an added (and, to me, more urgent) interest if we view it in the perspective of literature. (pp. 23-4)

Starting with the subject matter of a Balzacian realistic novel, and never wholly moving out of range of the Balzacian effort—to comprehend, to control, to contain—[Miss Clark] has made a book in which the novelist's gifts of identification has merged with the essayist's delight in selection of detail, the traveller's roots and relationships. In the end, [her characters] … all flow together in the one unity, that ungraspable unity of life which we can't put a finger on, but which we miss immediately if it is not there, and which is the difference between art and non-art…. I have talked about this book in terms of the novel because it could not have been written by anyone who wasn't, potentially or actually, a fine novelist, with the novelist's instinct for "the flavor of life itself." (p. 24)