The Transcendent Power of the Inanimate in ‘Wolf Solent’

Such might have been an intriguing topic for a doctoral thesis, had I written one, and had I discovered “Wolf Solent” in earlier times. So many oddities exist in this book, and so much of it reminds me of my mother. From her I inherited my preference for the inanimate over people, as both a conduit and a touchstone for the past, for nostalgia. From her I derived my extreme distaste for the personal, the prosaic, and for the coarseness of materialism. All of these tendencies are basic to “Wolf Solent.”