[Purdy's] originality and extraordinary talents cannot be neatly inventoried and … to portray him as the author of an eccentric body of fiction, as a part of some movement or fashionable literary trend, or as a novelist who essentially mocks the capacities of art, is to deny the complexities of his individual voice. His own description of his work as an exploration of the American soul conveyed in a style based on the rhythms and accents of American speech runs contrary to such categories and is a claim that merits examination.

The author's distinctive formal and philosophic preoccupations need to be seen in a broader, more tentative perspective. Although it has an urgent bearing upon the present day, there is a timeless quality to his work. The avowed concern for the world of the spirit and its relation to language evokes the native tradition of Melville and Hawthorne with their passion for metaphysics and command of symbolist techniques. As might be expected, there is also an evident fascination with the hellenic age when speculations on human destiny were at an intense pitch. Purdy sees modern America as the enemy of the soul and would subvert the suffocating patterns its culture imposes upon the individual self by his own exemplary fictions. Thus his families and miniature societies are simultaneously the vehicles for an exploration of the national psyche. At another level he re-tells, in his own special idiom, the Christian story of how a being charged with life's spiritual or divine possibilities is denied kinship in the larger world. It is misleading, then, to insist on measuring the characters in such a drama by the criteria of social realism or by those of a strict psychological verisimilitude. They are projections of the inner life, put forward as hypotheses about existence and endowed with the reality of the author's innermost convictions. Regarded in this light, art is accorded the highest functions—it keeps alive the memory of those ingredients that have been excluded from everyday existences and Purdy might more profitably be seen as the 'memorialist' of the qualities that have gone missing from his native culture. He is the self-styled prophet and chronicler of its omissions.

The philosophic basis of his work might loosely be described as that of the Christian existentialist. The difficulty of the individual's quest for an authentic selfhood in a society whose commercial forces, in particular, are pitted in opposition, is imaged in that pervasive feeling of being alone in an alien, absurd world. Characters are mysteriously orphaned and cut off from the source of their spiritual identity, in exile from some heavenly home. Their 'homelessness' is captured in those moments when the everyday fabric of life is suddenly shot through by radical doubts as they become aware of an essence that cannot be fulfilled within the terms of an earthly existence. A typical reaction is to abdicate the painful struggle, to refuse to live in the present and to conjure up idealised realms within the past or future. Though Purdy is fond of alluding to Platonic doctrines to comment on these inner yearnings, he is also acutely aware of the dangers associated with attempts to arrest life in forms that simulate such ideals. His vision has affinities with that expounded by Unamuno in his book The Tragic Sense of Life, for both articulate in their different ways the sense that it is the dialectic of faith and doubt itself, with its roots in the paradox of suffering, that offers an authentic mode of being. This religious dimension is responsible for that elusive manner in which highly individualised characters seem inseparably involved in some mythological drama or mystery play, in which life discourses upon its own possibilities and failings. This is not to suggest we are presented with dimly veiled allegories, but that the author's focus is upon the minute interactions of different levels of being.

These interactions are communicated by subtle formal strategies as distinct layers or patterns of meaning are brought into contact. Purdy resembles Faulkner in the sheer quantity of narrators he employs. But now the narrative act has turned in upon itself and instead of dramatising a search for meaning, it more frequently exemplifies the author's notion that real life has been reduced to the texture of a fiction. His characters typically aspire to an omniscience over the raw materials of their destiny and of those around them. Yet the stultifying consequences of such attempts to superimpose a story upon the actual world of love and suffering are constantly exposed by the subversive artistry of Purdy himself. Their elaborate constructions are caused to perform a slow dance of death, to spell out the 'inside story' as we are brought to read 'between the lines'. (pp. 8-10)