[Robert Kroetsch's] novels seem to defy the existential despair characteristic of contemporary prairie fiction both rural and urban. Kroetsch's anti-heroes are painfully aware of their isolation in a meaningless world running to waste; but they escape their anguish … through sheer gusto. Kroetsch's prairie men are the inheritors of the stonepicker's simple determination to endure and of … unregenerate, saucy humour, but they have an unquenchable exuberance which transcends both.

Johnnie Backstrom, the narrator and protagonist of The Words of My Roaring (1966), is, at thirty-three and six foot four, the giant of a man so typical of the prairie novel. Johnnie, the local undertaker, is running against Doctor Murdoch, the incumbent, for a seat in the Alberta legislature. He backs into a rash promise to bring the constituents rain before election day, a promise which in 1935 had particular appeal to drought-stricken electors. Johnnie was a prairie dreamer from the time he "saw all that distance out beyond;… that horizon so far away." But the dream and Johnnie's ambition are constantly mocked by the parched, implacable land: "Hope was faltering…. The stinkweed was shriveled and small, clinging to life low on the shoulder of the road; even the thistles, Canada and sow, looked stunted. Stunted and mean. The wheat fields themselves seemed to be praying for water, stirring as they did dumbly before a small wind."… (p. 133)

In a sense this is a familiar landscape, but Kroetsch's fresh vocabulary and irreverence give it a new complexion. The dry, sterile prairie is no longer simply an effective symbol of an unfulfilling world peopled by hollow men. The prairie has become a joke, a wonderful incongruity…. The landscape is bewildering, almost nightmarish: determinedly straight roads leading nowhere; modern communications futilely trying to bridge the great emptiness; the relentless sun torturing man with his impotence. Yet, when the earth mistress can be recognized as whore and bitch and labelled so, then man is ready to transcend his bond to her. Certainly at moments Johnnie, by his rhetorical gusto or his elaborate dreams, can escape the ties to a brutal land. When he makes love to Helen Murdoch, the enthusiasm of their passion renders totally unimportant the "dry broken grass, and the dust" amidst which they lie….

[For Kroetsch] the prairie is a landscape of elementals where the primary questions of existence become immediate. For Johnnie Backstrom the question is one of "beginnings and endings. The old confusion." Where and why was I born and why must things die? Johnny is ecstatic when rain finally comes, until his realization: "I had nothing to do with the rain." He is, like Tristram Shandy, merely the sport of small accidents. Control of one's destiny is ultimately illusory…. The climax of the novel, however, does not bring a sudden and permanent change in Johnnie Backstrom. In retrospect, this acknowledgement of his humanity and weakness takes its place with all the other jumbled insights into life which make up Johnnie's narrative. He now knows his exposure, like so many prairie men: "A man my size is a large target for the brute knuckles of existence. I was being pummeled." But he cannot forget his pride and ambition; he is still very weak in the face of temptation. The novel leaves him in a conundrum, perhaps to conclude that "chaos is the only order." Though Johnnie Backstrom is "forever condemned to grope," his natural ebullience transforms the groping into part of his essential vitality.

Like The Words of My Roaring, The Studhorse Man (1969) is a novel in which the serious and the touching are nicely balanced by comic zest. The Studhorse Man combines the boisterousness of Fielding and the lustiness of Sterne with the madhouse atmosphere of Ken Kesey. Told from within an insane asylum by the … [biographer] Demeter Proudfoot, the novel relates Hazard Lepage's travels throughout Alberta in search of the perfect mare to match with his noble stallion, Poseidon. The search for love and perfection is as much Hazard's and Demeter's as it is the stallion's. Hazard sacrifices all to his ultimate purpose, experiencing the worst that the brutal climate can do: "He had travelled bent and freezing against the snows of spring and now he was warm; rain squalls came with thunder to drive him across a treeless prairie and now he was dry; hailstorms knocked at his eyes and set the cannonballs of ice to leaping on the sun-packed roads; mud spattered him brown and gritty black; the wind drove dust into his flesh."

The fantastic extremes of the prairie climate are evoked, yet negated, by the delighted confidence of Demeter's description. Hazard gives up the warmth and dryness to risk all for the rash, unpredictable, and stubborn forces of sexual attraction…. He is at the mercy not only of equine sexual whims but of his own almost insatiable sexual appetite. The consequence is not comforting—as he faces the elements alone, so in all things is he utterly alone: "He must eat alone, travel alone, work alone, suffer alone, laugh alone, bitch alone, bleed alone, piss alone, sing alone, dream alone—…"

Kroetsch's exuberant style is richly humorous, yet beneath the humour is one of the most forceful expressions of human solitude to be found in the Canadian prairie novel. The prairie again provides the image for the meaningless void which hovers at the edge of Hazard's experience. The prospect of a vacuum, of total emptiness, is too real and Hazard seeks escape…. Apparently, however, the emptiness wins out. Hazard's dream is ended by the stallion in which he had placed total faith. Poseidon's sexual energy is ultimately inverted and commercialized at a Pregnant Mare Urine farm. Man's desire to satisfy his lust ends in sterile oblivion. Or does it? Even near death Hazard has one last glimmer of sexual vitality, impregnating Martha, and leaving behind a beautiful heiress. The answer must lie with the narrator who observes that the world beyond the walls of the institution is as great a madhouse as that within. The "confrontation with mere space," the outlook on a world devoid of expression or purpose leaves man terrified and neurotic.

In The Studhorse Man Demeter Proudfoot is quite insane. Yet Demeter's enthusiastic expression of the human quandary points to the artist as the source of some order. If this is the case the order is discovered, not as a replacement for the bewildering world, but from within the welter of paradox and inconclusiveness, a vigorous affirmation of life: "The very process of recurrence is what enables us to learn, to improve, to correct past errors, to understand the present, to guide the generations that are to come. Yet it is precisely this same characteristic of life that makes life unendurable. Men of more experience than I have lamented at the repetitious nature of the ultimate creative act itself."… (pp. 133-35)

The knowledge of oneself is in great part acquired from the knowledge of one's palce. "The prairie taught me identity by exposing me" affirms Wallace Stegner in acknowledging the influence of landscape. The precise nature of such identity is inevitably difficult to define. It emerges, however, in all its complexity as part of the experience of reading George Ryga, Margaret Laurence, Edward McCourt, Robert Hunter and Gabrielle Roy—these recent writers who represent, collectively, a maturity of interpretation in Canadian prairie fiction. [Yet, Robert Kroetsch's] fiction is at once a culmination and an indication of new directions…. Kroetsch discovers a symbolic richness in an empty vastness which has so often defied the imagination. But further, Kroetsch articulates new comprehension of the prairie landscape, both embracing the destructive nullity of his environment and defying it by a comic ebullience which celebrates man and life. "How do we fit our time and our place?" is the question Kroetsch poses to himself. His fiction has the conviction of the "simple necessity" which he recognizes will dictate his answer. (pp. 135-36)