SOURCE: A review of The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests, in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 64, No. 2, Summer, 1990, pp. 135-36.

In the following review of The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests, Schreiner interprets the book as a demonstration of West's philosophy of artistic necessity.

[The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests is a] teeming, propulsive book with the spirit and substance of butterflies clinging to a moving locomotive. Although Paul West's new novel is about Hopi life animated to a large extent by the perversities of American culture, these phenomena are not depicted with any concern for empirical accuracy but are taken in terms of their verbal energies, which are staggered across time in some attempt at narrative development. The writing produces the effect of shifting radio bands or a phased array radar system where one used to expect a consciousness. What one hears, West would say, are...