Word: clark
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Track Of The Cat, by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. Random House...
...TRACK OF THE CAT (404 pp.)- Walter Van Tilburg Clark-Random House...
Nine years ago, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, an overworked schoolteacher in upstate New York, bowled over the nation's critics with his first novel, a precision-built tour de force called The Ox-Bow Incident. Its firm, restrained handling of the problem of good and evil arising from a mob lynching crowned Clark with the halo of great promise. Five years later came The City of Trembling Leaves, a long, rambling study of sensitive youth in Reno, Nev., which made readers wonder if Ox-Bow had not been an accident of perfection. His new novel will keep them wondering...
...Track of the Cat, Clark again busies himself with the question of evil, but he has switched from the cool clarity of Ox-Bow to a naive, sometimes murky symbolism that gets in the way of his essentially simple yarn. Again the scene...
Back at the ranch house, Arthur's return lets loose a flood of repressed passion, recriminations and superstitious maundering that Novelist Clark's meager story structure is too fragile to bear. What happens out on the snow-covered range is more successful and easily the most exciting part of the book. In a first-rate section of more than 100 pages, Curt's pursuit of the cat becomes a thriller with symbolic moral overtones that will remind some readers of Moby Dick. The cunning of the cat, the cold, the lack of food, the growing image...