[In the following excerpt, Bryant offers a highly favorable review of In the Briar Patch.]

George Garrett, a young writer whose publications in verse and fiction should leave no doubt about the high quality of his gift, seems to share O'Connor's attitude toward the short story. The rough spots that characterize even the best of the stories in this collection testify to his ability to let a story discover itself; for if Garrett's stories are sometimes not quite finished, they are also never finished off. The title story, "In the Briar Patch," wanders somewhere along the road that stretches between Br'er Rabbit's "Please, Br'er Fox, don't throw me in de briar patch" and Hamlet's "rather bear those ills we have / Than fly to others that we know not of." It takes shape in the consciousness of a small boy, whose naïveté has preserved for him the independence of his elders' self-made mantraps and who can thus appreciate both the principle that Br'er Rabbit acts upon in the tar-baby tale and something of Hamlet's apprehensiveness about trying his luck in a strange world. This enables him to understand the plight of a young Negro soldier named Leroy whom his father has caught intimidating the household maid and turned over to the police. Leroy, it turns out, has been using the device of A. W. O. L. to move freely between the Army and the world of colored folk, two briar patches that he knows well; and he earns the little boy's admiration when he uses the rabbit's stratagem to persuade the civil authorities to turn him back to the military. Yet from his own protected position, the boy also has the insight to sympathize with his frustrated parent, who senses Leroy's victory and happiness but has long since lost the capacity to comprehend either.

Garrett's portrayal of the wisdom of innocence appears again and again in these stories: in a young girl, who, without instruction, acts out the timeless pastoral of lovemaking by trading buttermilk for kisses; in the simple-minded mountaineer who learns the knack of getting gifts from the sophisticated people who give him rides; in a young boy who in ignorance, innocence and wonder shelters and feeds a runaway lion. This last story, called simply "Lion," is symbolic of what Garrett seems to be doing in much of his work. One of the mottos that he places at the beginning of his collection, a passage from the Bible, says the same thing: "Let brotherly love continue. Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby others have entertained angels unawares." To Garrett the incident, the man, the lion, all are strangers and all are to be entertained, not because they are angels or even because they may turn out to be; but simply because brotherly love needs to continue. In short, Garrett's humility before the object and his respect for it seem to be the important reasons for his writing. He loves the lion because it is there, not because it can ever conceivably prove useful. He tames nothing. He protects and feeds everything. That is why his stories, even the roughest of them, seem to have an additional capacity for growth, and why the best of them are unmistakably alive.