For a long time, [Matthiessen's] writing has been vigorous, metaphoric, exact, luminous, coherent, and resolved. If one sensed that something was lacking, one did not know what to call it. In The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen's newest and best book, he tells us: "Not so long ago I could say truthfully that I had not shed a tear in twenty years." When I read this sentence, I suddenly knew: his older books—for all their elegance, for all their correct passion for land and wilderness, for all their steady intelligence—lacked the tribute of Matthiessen's tears….

The Snow Leopard is a serious book, as few books are serious, because it arises from a death, and returns to death itself and all our deaths, without morbidity and without nervous levity; with a clear, level, unavoiding gaze. It is a religious book, a book which tells us how to live. (p...