["At Play in the Fields of the Lord"] has nearly everything—a powerful plot, a rich variety of characters, a perceptive, deeply felt view of man's yearnings and his essential ironic tragedy, and a prose style that is vivid, sensuous and disciplined by intelligence. What it lacks—and, I'm afraid, prevents it not only from being a great novel but also from being even a particularly good one, is a sense, or quality, of necessity. By this I mean, the book does not compe...