The adjectives lyrical and poetic have often been applied to William Goyen's first novel, The House of Breath. They are not so misleading as most critical cachets because Goyen is a singer whose prose keeps time to the mysterious inner music of his characters.

Whether so much lyricism is a virtue, however, is another matter. I don't believe finally that it is. Being skeptical of epiphanies in general, I get annoyed with someone like young Ganchion, the narrator, who has one on every page. "Spit it out, boy," I keep thinking, "Say it straight." Instead, he trills it out in long plaintive songs about family tragedies and homesickness and some terrible yet ineffable loss of innocence that has transformed him into an Ishmael. Even when we acknowledge that the past is a foreign country and the flutterings of memory difficult to capture, Goyen's prose is frequently so convoluted, so self-consciously sensitive, that we are reminded more of the pre-Raphaelites than the Piney Woods. The simple homely events that obviously mean so much to him, and on which much of his best writing is based, dissolve into inscrutable private symbols that seem devoid of specific meaning.

The most intriguing voices in the novel—and House of Breath is a novel of voices, of interpolated monologues really—belong to Granny Ganchion and the scarred outcasts like Follie and Hattie. Talkers rather than singers, their speech is seasoned by place and folklore and a flinty, self-deprecating kind of humor that young Ganchion lacks…. Goyen [is] at the top of his form [when] his eye [is] fixed squarely on East Texas and his ear tuned to the cadences of local speech rather than the distant strains of violins and cellos. While it would be wrong to think of him only as a regional writer, especially given the acclaim his work has always received in Europe, it is fair to say that the farther he strays, geographically and psychologically, from familiar territory the more unsteady his writing becomes. Though cosmopolitan by nature, he is not a good traveler.

This is even clearer in his short stories [in The Collected Stories of William Goyen], which can be divided roughly into those that are set in East Texas and those that are not. Except for the uproarious "Savata, My Fair Sister," the second group is a disappointing mixture of inert mood pieces and ambitious but ultimately rather murky fables. Again, it's as though Goyen is trying so hard to escape the label provincial that he forgets about character and situation.

The first group, on the other hand, contains a number of memorable stories like "Rhody's Path," "Pore Perrie," "The Thief Coyote," and "Tapioca Surprise." These are solid achievements that have what Goyen says interests him most in a short story, a dramatic teller-listener situation, and in which the rich oral tradition of East Texas, that unique combination of the King James Bible, Negro spirituals, and Barnum and Bailey, works most impressively…. [These] stories stay with us long after we've closed the book. Not a false note anywhere. Which is not to say simply that Goyen writes better folk songs than arias but that when he listens intently to the rhythms of his own particular place, and allows characters and events to speak for themselves, he expresses truths that touch us all. (pp. 433-34)