Peter Matthiessen Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Sylvia Berkman

Critical Essay by Sylvia Berkman

[With] his first novel "Race Rock," [Peter Matthiessen] assumes immediate place as a writer of disciplined craft, perception, imaginative vigor and serious temperament.

The story he presents is intricate, both in method and in the complex of emotional relationships with which it deals. It is a story of salt shifting tidal waters, so to speak, not only in that its events take place against the shoreline of an ever-various, continual sea but, plunging deeper, in that its prime concern is with the rearranging interflowing briny particles of hate, love, shame and fear that form the groundswell of experience….

Mr. Matthiessen presents his material … with dramatic power and acute verisimilitude. He commands also a gift of flexible taut expression which takes wings at times into a lyricism beautifully modulated and controlled.

Sylvia Berkman, "The Reluctant Adults," in The New York Times Book Review, April 4, 1954, p. 5.