"A half-white child is born to a dying Native woman alone on the Kansas prairie in 1855. Adopted by a Saint Louis doctor, he grows up intelligent, willful, and perhaps cursed. He runs away at 16 and careens through several jobs and much money until trapped as a nursemaid to another precocious child in a small Kansas town. Hunchbacked, distant, and of alien stock, Joe Cobden lives an unheroic life, but the small insanities he takes part in or meets in that small town are the meat of this tremendous novel. Matthews has taken a dust-blown soap opera and turned it into a character study of warped minds and withered souls, of human nature distilled to essences by isolation"