The Nebraska plains and towns where much of his [Morris's] fiction is situated have little on the capacity of metropolis for suggesting the uncontrollable. On those occasions (The Deep Sleep or Man and Boy are examples) when Morris approaches the city, he does so only to concentrate on middle figures whose awareness of crisis ranges from minimal to non-existent. And as for his voice: it is invariably relaxed, wry, patient. “Come to the window,” his new book says quietly as it opens:

The one at the rear of the Lone Tree Hotel. The view is to the west. There is no obstruction but the sky. Although there is no one outside to look in, the yellow blind is drawn low at the window, and between it and the pane a fly is trapped. He has stopped buzzing. Only the crawling shadow can be seen. Before the whistle of the train is heard the loose pane rattles like a simmering pot, then stops, as if pressed by a hand, as the train goes past. The blind sucks inward and the dangling cord drags in the dust on the sill.

The tranquility of tone, the care of the composition, the evident desire to make even the most trivial event occur—these seem to stand in themselves for a total withdrawal from urgency.

Yet Morris's evocation of middleness, rural and other, has from the beginning had its allusion to ominousness, its hints of monster crabs seething noiseless and invisible in clipped, rose-bordered lawns. The suggestion of comical wars of nature is less misleading than might be thought. A notion of what surrounds and destroys the homely old objects of the Nebraska scene is brilliantly (and modestly) set forth in the jacket design of Ceremony in Lone Tree—red, brutal, bladelike wedges thrown down on the weathery wood spokes of a cart wheel. (The design is the work of Harry Ford.) But in Morris's writing the hum of the machine of otherness, incomprehensibility, seems in its subtle pervasiveness more like nature than nature itself, an encompassing, un-isolatable, half-comic force. The novel at hand, like The Works of Love and parts of The Field of Vision, is an ironic celebration of Scanlon, a 90 year old plainsman who knew Buffalo Bill. Newspaper agitation issues in a birthday celebration for the old man in a ghost town—an affair to which his family returns from suburbs everywhere in the land. The book is told in Morris's usual manner: a long view of the empty way station where the party is to be held; a series of static, more or less undramatized, shifts from consciousness to consciousness; and then one “galvanizing” event—an effort to enliven the ceremony that kills the pioneer with a paroxysm of joy.

There is more comic invention in this tale than in anything its author has done before—but the hilarity conceals neither the disabilities of the celebrants nor the elements of culture that are responsible for them. Boyd, a writer who left town young, is a self-acknowledged cripple; the impotency of the others is revealed indirectly. McKee, the plainsman's son-in-law, sits in his garage reading the paper outwardly “undisturbed,” but inwardly trembling at the ferocity of the new youth (GIRLS KIDNAP HUMBOLDT FARMER). “Where did they come from? Were they born the way normal children were born? What troubled [him] was … the knowledge that nothing he could say or do would ever change their belief that he was their mortal enemy. Every time [he] entered a corner drugstore or blinked his eyes in a movie lobby he saw these youngsters gazing at him with their sightless eyes.” McKee's wife, the plainsman's daughter, cannot believe in her own reality except when she is fumbling a grown grandson who terrorizes her. One of the plainsman's older great grandsons, Lee Roy Momeyer, works in a garage (it bears a sign that announces: “HAVE GUNS—WILL LUBRICATE”) and shoots his grease gun at college boys who come too close to the pit, or uses it to “pin the flies to the wall. …” The sister of this figure, Etoile (Eee-toal) Momeyer, the plainsman's great granddaughter, keeps a card file on bust development (“Under Jayne Mansfield Etoile had written, Not so hot”). The father of the two, another of the plainsman's sons-in-law, is a postman who reads Popular Mechanics half the night, spends years working on a self-filling fountain pen, drives an old Fire Department Hupmobile with a dead red bulb on its roof, comes home daily from his route to “pick and dress half a dozen chickens,” and then “goes off with his bow and arrow … until dark.” Nor are the other inheritors of the past less sick or less mad.

It is said of their creator that he is the darling of the Litry—and Ceremony in Lone Tree does show signs, like Morris's earlier books, that he has read other writers beside himself, including Faulkner and perhaps even Nabokov (Morris is the latter's equal or superior on the subject of The American Road). It is also said of him that his people are weightless and insignificant, and as the foregoing catalogue indicates, the charge is just: Bud Momeyer the postman stirs only laughter, the burial procession of the quasi-heroic Westerner stirs only the sense of pathos—there are no giants on this writer's plains. The defense of Morris need not rest, however (as it has done in the past), entirely on his wit, or on his power to create out of emptiness a living scene, or even on his eye for such boondocks of the age as the castrating Female. His strongest claim is that alone among American writers he has an intuitive sense of the present quality of that life of the middle that has been spoken of here: a sense of waves of kitsch, buried Calvinism, bogus hatred (of the city), bogus love (for the tough old mountain men, The Pioneers), fear of the bomb and disbelief in the bomb that now torment and now titillate the millions who still sit on kitchen chairs instead of on kitchen bar stools, who still play pinochle on Wednesday nights, who still think they themselves are bringing up their children. His accomplishment is that of persuading his reader that the doom of these characters is not different from, nor less a matter to be soberly felt than, the ruin of Village speech, the decay of Bar Harbor, or even (extravagant as it appears to say) the misery of 104th Street. It is probably fair to ask whether the present middle culture ought not to yield something better than a letter-carrying Robin Hood, and it is possible that the man who answers with a violent affirmative is a genius rather than merely another somnambulist “utterly removed from contemporary reality.” But the possibility is hardly vivid enough to discourage a firm impulse of gratitude for the singer of Lone Tree. He is less than Tolstoy like many others, but he is alive, and were it not for what he has snatched from the Chiclet-dripping jaws of our hell, the Schooner State, these faint visions of real buffalo on real plains, and all trustworthy trace of the vanishing, self-destroying class might even now have disappeared.