There was Willa Cather’s fine Song of the Lark, and Harper Lee’s perfect To Kill a Mockingbird, and David James Duncan’s great headlong Pacific Northwest coming-of-age novel The River Why, and best of all, greatest of all, the glorious hilarious epic sprawling wondrous novel The Horse’s Mouth, by the Irishman Joyce Cary, and that was all, just those four, the three lean and the one thick with Cary’s word-wizardry; and now I look back through the years at that shelf and wonder if those four books did not nearly encapsulate and characterize and explain and draw a collective map to the woman who
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