George Garrett would seem to share with Juvenal an appreciation of the virtues of the backwater, an admiration for simple loyalties, and a propensity for what Winston Churchill called the harsh laugh of the soldier. (p. 308) Mr. Garrett is a Southerner who, after having lived in other places and countries, has decided to live in the South, and has committed himself to his native region in fact as well as in name…. He does not, as perhaps he should not, attempt to explicate the principles on which he ...

Death of the Fox is splendid, a magnificent book, and very probably one of the dozen best novels to have been written in my lifetime. Indeed, it is so extraordinary a work that it raises certain questions about the history and the future of the novel itself, about the relation of the novelist to his public, and about the ultimate mysteries of Fame and Fortune which lie not only at the heart of this novel but at the heart of the experience of all of us. (p. 277) The technical excellence of both [The Finished...

George Garrett is a mature writer—Do, Lord, Remember Me is his third novel, his fifth book of fiction—and the fruits of his long apprenticeship are apparent here. (p. 160) It may not be possible to end this kind of book in a manner that is thoroughly satisfactory…. [His] conclusion seems a little thin, if only from a technical viewpoint…. [But this is a minor complaint when] balanced against Garrett's overall performance. Telling his story largely from a series of first pe...

[Death of the Fox] is called "a novel about Ralegh," and though the author's note explicitly states that it is not a biography,… it can and perhaps should be read as a biography written with the literary liberties available to the novelist but not to the formal and traditional biographer. Garrett, making full use of the freedom available to the novelist—who is not held to the strict limits of accountability of the historian or the biographer—does a fine job of placi...