I hesitate to call this work a novel. In fact, Robert Penn Warren hesitates to call it a novel. He christens it a Romance, correctly I think. It is far more apt a term. The book for which poet RPW is most famous is, of course, All The King's Men, which is indeed a tour de force of at least three novels woven seamlessly into one. His most powerful work, though, I still think to be World Enough And Time: An almost inhuman book of fulgurous brilliance lighting a desolate nightscape of the human soul. But this book as I - and Warren - say, is a Romance.
More - it is a particular type of Romance - the Elegy. It is sad and sweet with deep, long chords drawn out over hundreds of pages for the dying town of Fiddlersburg, the central character of Brad Tolliver and a host of other characters, living and dead, connected by what one of them calls a "mystic osmosis."
As for the writing, this same character, Blanding Cottshill, says, a propos thereof at one point in this elegy: "And without irony - I mean an awareness of that doubleness of life that lies far below flowers of rhetoric or pirouettes of mind - no real conversation, conversation of inner resonance, is possible." The writing here is full of the awareness of this human ambiguity and doubleness.
It is also, however, replete with flowers of rhetoric and pirouettes of mind, as befits an elegy. It's a lovely, lush prose poem for all humanity. And, as with all RPW's works, leads the reader into a mindset of deep contemplation.
To say that it falls short of RPW's best work - as it does - is not to disparage it by any means.