Memoirs of a Peon, set in New Zealand early this century, works by creating a character in the first person through a highly idiosyncratic style. The reader is apt to concern himself with how cunningly the style is kept up, regardless of what it is meant to express. Here it is an absurdly pompous Latinate diction, long-winded and devious, and presumably it is meant to create the persona of a man who has taken refuge from the squalors, embarrassments and rebuffs of everyday life … in a pose of pedantic detachment. It is clearly a serious effort of literary art that is being made; but it fails, it is generally not different enough from quite inadvertent longwindedness, because little means is found of suggesting what the 'hero' would have been like objectively.

David Craig, "American Families," in New Statesman, Vol. LXX, No. 1802, September 24, 1965, pp. 448, 450.∗