Love Quote by Carl Clinton Van Doren

“Conventional” is the dagger here, slipped in with the casual authority of a critic who knows the market’s formulas and isn’t impressed by them. Van Doren reduces the love affair in Guy Rivers to a “piece” of the machinery - not the engine, just a standardized part bolted on because the genre requires it. That phrasing carries a faint sneer: romance isn’t being condemned as an impulse, but as a narrative obligation, a box checked to make frontier violence palatable and saleable.

Then he pivots to what he clearly finds more legible, maybe more honest: “deadly strife” between “the laws of Georgia” and “a fiendish bandit.” The conflict is framed as pure melodrama - state authority versus near-supernatural villainy. “Laws of Georgia” doesn’t mean abstract justice; it means regional power, a local order with its own historical baggage. The bandit isn’t merely criminal but “fiendish,” a moral caricature that flatters the law by giving it an enemy unworthy of nuance.

The subtext is about American storytelling itself: early national and regional novels often smuggled ideology inside sensational plots. You get the civic myth (order must prevail, the state is the protagonist) wrapped in pulp pleasures (blood, pursuit, outlaw glamour), with a decorative romance to reassure readers they’re consuming “literature,” not just thrills. Van Doren’s sentence works because it performs what it diagnoses: briskly inventorying the parts, making the book sound like a contraption assembled from conventions rather than a living thing.