The writing [in Winter in the Blood] is constantly fending off easy attitudes and conclusions with a flat, brooding precision. The reader keeps wanting to be able to make something of it all, to be clear how these people are Indians, how being an Indian makes a difference. Welch himself is a Montanan, Blackfoot and Gros Ventre, and in Winter in the Blood one may find out what it is like to be an Indian, this Indian, but just what that means is never once offered us for summary or conclusion. It is an unnervingly beautiful book. (p. 20)

As one might imagine, there are fine conversations in bars, and they have just the right quality of aimlessness and direction of life being lived and not lived. (p. 21)

Writing as flat and quiet as this, in a novel that is mostly dialogue, tempts one to think of Hemingway, to praise its tact and understatement. But Winter in the Blood has no such Hemingway sense of style or life; it states everything fully, seeks no sense that these people are responding "gracefully under pressure," because there is no pressure. But that does not lead Welch either to absurdist acceptance or to despair, but to a careful page-by-page measurement of the precise value of however little there is to these lives. Of course in a book like this there is bound to be a problem with plot, because one is inevitably attitudinizing if one uses a plot to give the lives shape or if one refuses to use plot to refuse to give them shape. Here too Welch's instinct seems to me just right. Beyond the first excitement of finding a book so carefully done, one can begin to get twitchy and ask where it is all going, restless with the possibility that Welch will try to get away with saying it is going nowhere. (pp. 21-2)

James Welch in this first novel is only a truth-teller, and Winter in the Blood may be the only one he can write because writers this sternly devoted to telling the truth often don't have many more than one or two tales to tell. We must hope not. Winter in the Blood is short, done almost before one feels well begun with it, but I felt very much in its presence long after I had finished. (p. 22)