By placing the novel's present in the aftermath of the mine's closing and freely shifting the time, space, and point of view, Crews puts the primary focus on the consequences of a failed creation and the role of history in interpreting and evaluating those consequences. The scope and significance of those consequences is enlarged by the quasi-allegorical framework of the story: a new world shaped by an unseen creator and left in the keeping of the created, who struggle to understand and control it, and who continually remold it in their own image.

Crews is fully contemporary, however, in his ironic and absurdist use of the mythic parallels: the Christ figure is a grotesque, impotent, self-absorbed recluse who, in the final scene, moves like a grotesque baby through crowds of cheering and jeering spectators in a painful parody of a triumphal entry down a Via Dolorosa toward the...