Mr. Wright Morris's The Field of Vision won the 1957 American National Book Award, whose judges wrote, “he is the voice and conscience of provincial America.” If undistinguished prose and jargon constitute their provincial voice and conscience, they are right. Or it may be that American and English writing are now so far removed from one another that an Englishman cannot appreciate American provincial life, when described in thousands of sentences of this kind, “… you would think in a town of twelve hundred people what kids there were would all know each other, but they didn't and that was the thing about Polk …”; or, “what he felt was, when he began to feel something, that it was an old feeling and he had felt it many times before. He recognized that feeling. …”

Once the English reader has adapted himself to reading twelve words where six will do he will find something authentically American in The Field of Vision. As a determined “creative” novelist, Mr. Wright Morris is not frightened of trying to say things in a new way. For instance, his subject is a bull-fight, but only because a bull-fight has elaborate overtones for his hero. “The durable fragments of his memory seemed to gather round the bull-ring as round a magnet, and his mind was compelled to come to imaginative terms with them.” In spite of some agreeable portraits of rustic types, old Uncle Sams, &c., this elaborate symbolism demands too great an effort on the part of the reader who reads for pleasure.