[In the following review of The Dust within the Rock, Jackson commends the vitality of Waters's writing while lamenting its weak characterization and symbolism.]

In 1935, Mr. Waters began the full-packed trilogy, of which this volume is the concluding part, with The Wild Earth's Nobility, a novel of boom days in Colorado covering the period from 1870 to the 1990s. It was the story of Joseph Rogier, who made his fortune at carpentering and contracting and finally fell victim to the gold fever, losing all he had. Two years later Mr. Waters carried on the story with Below Grass Roots, in which old Rogier desperately continued his search for gold in the granite of Pike's Peak. Center of interest in this second part was Rogier's son-in-law, Cable, whose Indian blood taught him that while life must be directed, while living must be channeled to a purpose, life is also something to be lived.

In the third and last book of the trilogy [Dust Within the Rock], the author follows the fortunes of March Cable, grandson of old Rogier, in whom the granite of his white grandfather and the softer earth of his Indian father are blended. Boy and young man, March has always the problem of working out his adjustment to an America which is tuned to the man of granite, yet, in its heart of hearts, knows that it needs the man of the earth too.

March Cable had to spend most of his youth in a household in which only the Rogier pride counted for anything. Brothers and sisters went away, looked for their fortunes somewhere outside of Colorado Springs—Mr. Waters's "Little London." His grandfather remained, with Mrs. Rogier and his mother, somehow holding things together though they had to sell more and more of their furniture to keep alive. The old man could not forget his mining failure; every now and then he would brood about it, and the brooding always hastened the recurrent "spells" with which he was afflicted. March worked, put himself through school and into college by selling newspapers, acting as guide to the tourists in season, always trying to find some reason for things, to come at some explanation of his inner conviction that he would have to leave Little London, learn about life somewhere else. Eventually he did leave, and Mr. Waters takes him up into the oil fields, down into the deserts of the Southwest, eventually across the border into Mexico, trying to find out what he was meant for, why he felt himself so strongly a part of America yet alien, too. In the end he grows up, becomes an integrated, complete man.

What Mr. Waters is saying is that March is America, that he is the forerunner of the "new man on one of time's strange thresholds," the New American, the rock and the dust within the rock, the man on whom tomorrow will be built.

If Mr. Waters's novel has a weakness, this lies in his tendency to over-insist on the symbolic. Imaginative in a high degree, possessed of tremendous, rushing, cascading energy, he is inclined to subordinate his characters to the twin requirements of story and message. Incident piles on incident; it is as though the author were breathlessly trying to get in everything he has seen or heard or thought of, everything he has experienced or imagined or learned. Yet almost invariably all this incident is used not to develop character, to explain his people, but to make clear his thesis that tomorrow's America will become great only through the fusion of the symbolic "granite and adobe," that the rock and the dust within the rock are one and the same, and the foundation for what is to come.

The result, as has been the case with the earlier books of the trilogy, is that Mr. Waters's people slip away from him. Even March himself comes to life only occasionally and then chiefly as a shell illuminated by the author's ideas about what he stands for. Only old Rogier the indestructible, granite-hard man of one idea really takes on length and breadth and thickness. He dies, to be sure, but not until he has made his final grotesque gesture—his last crazy tunnel through the soft earth beneath his little greenhouses, toward the enduring granite of Pike's Peak six miles away. The reader will remember old Rogier: the hardness and the strength and the drive of the man are real, solid, something to take hold of. As for the rest, not one of the lot makes any difference, excepting March, and March lives entirely through and by Mr. Waters's use of him as a transmitter.

This is not to say that Dust Within the Rock has no value as a story. In spite of its shadowy characters the book has enormous vitality. Mr. Waters has a great deal to say and he says it. His story, too, is studded with bits of splendid story-telling such as the brief scene in which March sees his inmost thought spring into actuality when the bullying trainman falls beneath the wheels, or some of the Mexican bits. Yet—well, cross Mr. Thomas Wolfe with Mr. Vardis Fisher and you'll have some idea of the way this book leaps at you, takes you by the throat and wrestles with you, stands off and mutters while you get your breath and leaps again. As for the manner of his writing, Mr. Waters is at his best when he is re-creating the color and the significance of the old Cripple Creek days, when he is interpreting what he calls "the ruins of America's unrest." He understands the philosophy of mining and miners.

Perhaps it is not fair to suggest that Mr. Waters should strive for a kind of disciplined form which, apparently deliberately, he chooses to avoid. But the reader cannot help wishing he had done just that. His novel has meat on its bones, blood in its veins; its nervous system is highly charged, it has something to say. But it never quite takes shape, for all its author's vigor and imagination.