[The pattern of "The Studhorse Man"] is circular, as is Hazard's journey, and the point—made in a manner that fuses prairie tall-tale with Odyssean myth—is that perfectionists procrastinate and thus waste their lives while life in general goes muddling on around them. In the long run, Poseidon tramples Hazard to death … and the narrator goes off his head, the strain of "knowing" Hazard and of trying to tell the truth about him having proved too great.

There's a certain amount of strain for the reader too, especially if he always wants to know exactly what's going on; but if he can resist, at least as often as the narrator does, what the narrator calls "the necessity of interpretation," he will have a ball as Mr. Kroetsch's gross hero stalks with his prize beast through a landscape as abstract as it is lovingly delineated, as crammed with garrulous eccentrics as it is also demoralizingly empty….

In other words "The Studhorse Man," like all good books, stretches the mind, and does so with a gross yet realistic central notion flanked by bouts of farce….

An Englishman grandly withdraws from history; a horse ignominiously swyves his way into it; and, in between, Mr. Kroetsch stages a raunchy pantomime in which pigstickers and penis-measurers, bone-buyers and hockey-stars, an ancient nun and an almost blind ranch-mistress, reel toward and past one another, hunching away from history and the world outside and mouthing Albertan saws. Fond as he is of exaggeration, Mr. Kroetsch (who is a Canadian) knows the mundanities he starts from, whether they are those of a wedding in a Ukrainian Orthodox church or of a pell-mell coyote hunt. His region has its reasons, and he respects them; indeed, he insinuates them relentlessly throughout the hyperbolical fun of the whole thing.

And that is quite a feat, considering how unabashed his narrator is. For here is a miasmic egoist whose name (Zeus help him) is Demeter, who thrives on the wacky improvisations of his overheated mind and madly looks back to the point at which his madness began, which was when he first met Hazard, who is eugenics-mad. Life for this Demeter, as for that other one who was goddess of agriculture, fruitfulness and marriage, is an eternal sensuous return, which makes him, I suppose, a déjà-voyeur. Ancient and modern and maybe androgynous, he frisks away nonstop, and Mr. Kroetsch gets as much festivity out of him as out of the Hazard-Poseidon duo. This is a spunky novel, off-beat and tartly unprovincial.