[I don't particularly like either of Birney's two novels] yet I find that each has a facet which is of real interest. Down the Long Table, for example, despite certain structural flaws which Birney has acknowledged, is still an interesting novel if only because of the quality of the insight it provides into the politics of the Thirties. My response to Turvey is divided in a similar way. Turvey himself is an almost moronic character. In The Creative Writer Birney describes him as a "dumb backwoods private … with the intellectual and soldierly capacity of a farmyard duck," and overall Turvey's responses to the absurd and predictable situations in which he is placed are about as compelling and, with a few exceptions, as funny as those of an intellectual duck. The novel fails because the central character is not complex enough to engage the reader's interest for almost three...