[In The Surface of the Earth] Price works with a heavy hand. In almost every word he insists on his seriousness, the significance of the events as they unfold; and as if to underline the images that he wishes us to grasp, he repeats himself again and again through the course of the novel.

Miscegenation is rampant [in this forty-year chronicle of two families]. Children of mixed blood are born, one of whom, the son of a Mayfield, becomes a major character in the novel. Older generations interfere in the lives of the young; misunderstandings accrue; marriages are disrupted…. The men are weak, unreliable; the women are strong. Events, characters, gestures—males lying down on top of other males, not in sexual irregularity, but in mystic farewell—lead finally to a similarity of voice, a stylistic monotony that for a quarter of a million words is unrelieved. All...