SOURCE: “About Any Kind of Meanness You Can Name,” in Sewanee Review, Vol. XCIII, No. 4, Fall, 1985, pp. 649-56.

In the following excerpt, Sullivan commends Hoffman's prose style but finds Godfires to be a reprise of well-worn views and attitudes about the contemporary American South.

The three novels discussed here are all more or less southern, but otherwise they are about as different as they could be. The hero of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, from which I take my title, is born in Tennessee, but the action of the novel occurs in the American West. Lewis Green's The Silence of Snakes is set in the mountains of North Carolina between the world wars, and its themes are traditionally southern. William Hoffman’s novel, [Godfires,] laid in rural Virginia with occasional incursions into Richmond, engages the ambiguities of the modern South.

In one of its dimensions Godfires is a novel...