Clapsaddle opens with a sensual poem by Benjamin Cutler, “The Lovers’ Prayer to the Body,” that describes the aesthetic sensation of touch as an essential aspect of the human experience, linking a person to life and death. As an old man, Cowney looks back over the summer he spent at Grove Park Inn and his chance finding of a random bone in the ground, which caused great problems for him. He also thinks of a little girl who disappeared and a teenage girl he fell in love with who taught him there are many different kinds of love: “And now it seems possible that love is the only thing that will outlive us all, but only if we continue to tell its story” (3). The experience revealed above all that people and their place on the earth belong to each other beyond any legal prescriptions—a first expression of the theme of Life and Death as an Eternal Cycle.

Cowney, the protagonist, is also the novel’s narrator. He tells the story of his paternal grandmother, Lishie, taking care of him after his father dies in World War I. His uncle