[In the following excerpt, Davenport praises Hoffman's skill as a novelist and offers a positive assessment of Furors Die.]

“Caelum, non animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt”: those who rush across the sea change their climate, not their minds. Thus ran Horace’s advice to his travelling friend Bullatius. Given the right sort of mind, you will find what you seek anywhere, even at squalid Ulubrae—or, given the wrong sort, nowhere. Horace’s line has enjoyed a modicum of fame, no doubt because there have always been enough impenetrably ethnocentric travellers to make it seem true. But there are other conclusions that might be drawn here as well. For, if it is the mind that makes the place, then the mind—the right sort, once again—can presumably find (or create) significantly different meanings in different places.

There is hardly a finer instance of this “right” sort of mentality than Henry James, whose life’s work is, among other things, the record of a profound and sensitive mind’s self-conscious interaction with the places of the visible world. Such an achievement as The American Scene owes everything to James’s faith (or “superstition” as he calls it) that “objects and places, coherently grouped, disposed for human use and addressed to it, must have a sense of their own, a mystic meaning proper to themselves to give out,” and that it is “the prime business and the high honour of the painter of life always to make a sense—and to make it more in proportion as the immediate aspects are loose or confused.” Thus when the “restless analyst” of that book goes from New England to Philadelphia, he experiences not so much a Horatian change of climate as “the change of half the furniture of consciousness”—acknowledging in that luminous phrase that just as the mind creates places, so too do places create (or at least furnish) the mind.

In a country as large and geographically diverse as the United States, it should not be surprising to find novelists requiring the localities of their fiction to bear a large burden of meaning, as of course they have always done and continue to do. In many ways our fiction has never been more place-conscious, more regional, than it is now. The desire to resist standardization has been one of the main impulses behind literary regionalism (the southern Agrarian movement being the most notable example), and in a society that often seems nowadays to be in a state of mass-media-induced hypnosis, such resistance is doubtless commendable. The irony is that when today’s novels fail, as they often do, it is usually owing to other sorts of standardization of which their authors seem to be at times deliberate manipulators and at other times innocent pawns. …

The problem with many of today’s novelists is that their characters, incidents, and places strike the reader as ideas or conceptions rather than observations. The most magically impressionistic and expressionistic painting, to shift genres for a moment, seems always to come from artists who insist that they are merely trying to record what they see: Manet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse. The point is that they do see, instead of learning to duplicate another artist’s formula, and this is why they come to constitute the history of art while the skilled academics of their day quickly come to oblivion. The same often seems to be true of literature, as with García Márquez, who has claimed simply to be presenting life as he has experienced it. Knowing how to write or how to paint is not enough: what is required is the sort of passionate honesty that we quite accurately call vision.

It is some such quality that makes William Hoffman one of our best living writers, regional or otherwise. His tenth novel, Furors Die, might sound bland in summary: it follows two West Virginia boys, one rich, one poor, from their adolescence into their adult professional and social lives. They are constant rivals, each infecting the other’s life in a way that might perhaps remind the reader of Hotspur and Prince Hal. Clearly the author was not thinking of the dustjacket when he wrote this novel—no poetizing morticians or communes of incorrigible women here. Anyone acquainted with Hoffman’s work knows that he invariably beats the “inventors” at their own game, and in Furors Die he turns out transvestite hookers and lunatic fundamentalists with the best of them. Courtroom tables groan under the mountain of artificial limbs and other prosthetic devices entered as exhibits in a class-action suit against coal mine owners. And then there is the fall of the aristocratic Emerson Smythe, discovered by the city police “and two frantic mothers” as he lies “naked and drunk on an oriental rug, his bluish white body sparkling with sugary gumdrops, while around him laughed and skipped two six-year-old girls in pigtails and starched blue pinafores.”

Mostly what Hoffman does, of course, is see: “Rock slides from the snow-shrouded mountains blocked sections of Route 60, and misshapen icicles hung from boulders. Bleak leafless trees stood like the condemned in the shrieking, relentless wind.” Or this: “Fine new houses were being built on hills across the river. Trees fractured, tipped, and fell and raw ground spread in the forest like mange. People with money were attempting to elevate themselves above the smoke.” This landscape and the characters who people it are simultaneously real and fantastic, impossible and inevitable.

The visible world signifies in Furors Die to a degree that has few parallels in recent fiction, the split between the haves and the have-nots being perfectly embodied in the contrasting worlds of the two Virginias:

When they crossed the border into Virginia, Wylie felt the rules changed. He’d often had the sensation that the West Virginia land itself might uprear and hurl boulders or that savage, bearded men would leap from the ice-sheathed forest to rape and pillage.

At Virginia the mountains tamed, the roads straightened and became wider, the law took hold. There were manners as well as order among the people, a breeding even among the hayseeds, a rural gentility. The mountains of West Virginia, like a fortress, blocked amenity and refinement.

When a novelist and his characters can see such meaning in the places he creates, when he can thus present these places—or reveal them—as the furniture of consciousness, there is not much doubt about the authenticity and value of his work. This capability has always been a rare gift, and it seems reasonable to conclude from the present state of the art that it does not become any less rare as the number of aspirants to the title of novelist increases.