[Upon publication of the first volume of The Human Predicament, titled The Fox in the Attic, Richard Hughes] was called a genius, compared to Tolstoy and generally treated as a great modern novelist who had set out to produce the great English novel of the decade. There are many things in the world I will never understand; this response is one of them…. The book maddeningly jumped from one scene, character, country to another, trying to appear big and vast; moved, despite the constant shifting, at a snail's pace; and was so mannered that the reader was nearly suffocated by style. The Wooden Shepherdess is the perfect sequel: it is as impossible as its predecessor…. Hughes has the strange notion … that by recording one disconnected scene after another, thinly sketching a host of wooden characters and tossing in references to historical events,… he is producing some statement about...