What makes "Nests in a Stone Image" [in Ghost and Flesh] much more than an indulging of an all-too-writerly propensity to write about one's own writing is Goyen's use of imagery of the life of Jesus. The writer's vigil is patterned on Jesus' night of prayer and doubt in Gethsemane and overlaid with allusions to other aspects of his life. But "Nests in a Stone Image" is not updating of Jesus' story: the writer may agonize, but he is acutely aware...

[Goyen] differs markedly from his contemporaries in his lyrical, poetic translation of material into his imagined world. Mood finally supplants place. When the specifications of place and people fade, the violence becomes grotesqueness. The shadowy, elusive figures drop the forthrightness of violence and take on the half-lights, the mysteries, and the freakishness of the grotesque. Although their existence often seems other-worldly, these ghosts are related to the fear of crass industrialism and standardiza...

As befits an age of universal solitude, in which art often is about art, William Goyen's stories are a testament to the essentiality of telling. He regards such communication as a form of love, a process including seeing and saying: to tell one must know; once one knows he must tell. The teller devotes his life to shaping an "anxious shapelessness" into truth. (p. 77) The willingness to discipline himself in the use of language underlies his entire achievement as a writer. His stories r...

[The Collected Stories of William Goyen] is the book William Goyen has been writing all his career. A born storyteller, even his four novels (The House of Breath, In a Farther Country, The Fair Sister, Come the Restorer) are composed of stories joined together by a common thread of locale of circumstance, so many beads on a string…. Covering a creative span of nearly thirty years, the book reveals what too few have acknowledged: William Goyen is one of our most distinguished and uncompromising fictio...

Alive in William Goyen is a primal affinity with the first things of creation…. He has the keen senses of the woodsman, whom no creak or rustle can elude. He registers the sensual qualities of natural things, and it is as though he himself had experienced, from within, the cycle of germination, budding, flowering, and withering of all created matter. We seem to be hearing the voice of an aboriginal American that is being constantly pushed back by industrial civilization and forced to languish in its ...

The adjectives lyrical and poetic have often been applied to William Goyen's first novel, The House of Breath. They are not so misleading as most critical cachets because Goyen is a singer whose prose keeps time to the mysterious inner music of his characters. Whether so much lyricism is a virtue, however, is another matter. I don't believe finally that it is. Being skeptical of epiphanies in general, I get annoyed with someone like young Ganchion, the narrator, who has one on every page. �...