["The City of Trembling Leaves"] is a book of which the faults and the virtues are combined in an unusual way and which may baffle or give pause to the reviewer…. It is a long history of a young composer growing up in Reno, Nevada, and it manages to be undramatic with a consistency that seems to be not deliberate but the result of a complete indifference to the ways in which stories are conventionally built (the author can tell a good story when it happens to work out that way, as is demonstrated by the chapter on the track meet). Mr. Clark takes us, episode by episode, through the protracted adolescence of his hero with what, aside from the literary proficiency, would seem almost the innocence of adolescence itself…. [We] are led to believe—since the author seems to know what he is doing—that [the lengthy...