"Try to pull that out," he said, handing me the hammer. I pulled it out. It seemed eight times harder than a normal nail.

"That's harder than a normal nail," I said.

"Eight times harder," he said.

It is all the more appalling when an Iowan like this goes down into The City.

In a novel so full of stark sillouettes it is too bad when the lucidity breaks down. There are some things that Rhodes cannot communicate: Reuben himself tells us that he is not altogether sure what finally got him out of The City, into the "finished, unfinished position" at which he finds himself when the book ends. He thinks that it has something to do with his sister Nellie, but there seems to be an emotion here that is too powerful and complex for him to convey: the isolation he laments throughout the novel finally cuts him off from the reader. There should be more than just echoes of Nellie. Perhaps sometimes the sealed resonance of the style (reading the book is like probing through a cave) could put people off, making them wary of contrived profundity, of too imposing a persistence in what the author is trying to say.

But this last tentative objection may be reactionary: we are used to ephemeral contemporary novelists (for example, Updike) who find beautiful ways of circumventing and clever ways to hedge. Rhodes's is a new and highly original kind of realism. We need it badly, but it will be hard to accept without more from the same young writer.

You leave The Last Fair Deal Going Down as from the complete cycle of a drug--reeling, dazed, and adjusting again to an old reality in a new way. The brooding silence of the Midwest is manic and never bucolic like it was. There may be a quieter, more determined explosion building up there--a tension less frenetic than the cities, less jaded than the South, and less crazily precarious than the Far West. The Middle West could begin to figure in American literature in a big way, and the heart of our country could become the backdrop for the heart of our despair.