Byrne's "The Blood Hardened and Blood Running: The Character of Orville in Blood Ties" does David Adams Richards's novel a disservice. Byrne's fundamental idea is that the community's only hope lies with Orville, for Orville functions as a symbolic battleground in which positive female forces contend with negative male forces -- forces which are, respectively, representative of Good and Evil. However, Orville is not unique in displaying this kind of psychological complexity and these symbolic dimensions. Moreover, in Richards's fiction, no single character represents the key to local regeneration, if there even is any possibility of regeneration. Finally, Byrne's division of the characters into male/evil and female/good is found lacking because it is overly simplistic and negates the human complexity of the different characters.
