A constant source of worry for his long-suffering wife, Alice, Peter's whimsical nature becomes a cause for concern to his sons also, with his announcement that he intends to bequeath ‘Shangri-La’, ‘a sizeable tract of land’[1] on Tinmouth Mountain, to an old friend, Hans Strasser.
Worried that their father has either lost his mind or that he might be a victim of fraud, and frustrated at the prospect of losing part of their inheritance, Peter's family protest the arrangement.
At nineteen-years-old, Tip is still struggling with the problems of adolescence, and his search for his own identity has reached a crisis point, in his inability to divulge his love for a girl, Libba Vann.
Like Tommy, Nels is engaged in a struggle with the reality of his own mortality, and the tragedy of the death of one of his students brings him out of his neurotic obsession over the health of his heart and into deeper reflections.
Another son, the bullying and hypochondriacal dean of a school like Exeter who fantasizes continually about receiving the farewell visits of friends as he lies dying in a hospital, is the Cowardly Lion in search of courage.
In addition to the ‘search for identity’[11] Dale Brown writes that ‘Buechner weaves into The Entrance to Porlock themes related to his growing theological vocabulary – loss of innocence, the attainment of full humanity, and the presence of grace’.
The writing process was also affected by broader national events: 'To make matters still worse,' he continues, 'that was the year when both Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were murdered, and I remember wondering if there was anything the world needed much less to have added to its pain than another book.
In Now and Then Buechner writes, If Harvard had invited me to come pick up gum wrappers with a pointed stick, I suppose I would have been flattered, and though I'd never heard of the Noble Lectures, the men who had given them in earlier years were a group to conjure with – Teddy Roosevelt, for some reason that was never made clear to me, had been the first, but from then on they had been people like H. Richard Niebuhr and George Buttrick, and even Paul Tillich had accepted the assignment but died before the time came round.
Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Diana Loercher roundly praised The Entrance to Porlock: There appears every now and again a lyrical, dreamlike novel that is more poem than prose, more parable than story.
Such novels incapacitate conventional critical faculties; we do not understand and evaluate them rationally but rather are immersed, lulled, and transported, as in listening to music, into a shadowy world where feelings are evoked and nothing is explained.
McCoy is especially appreciative of the intertextuality of The Entrance to Porlock, noting that its ‘artful retelling of The Wizard of Oz’ is ‘related with compelling warmth and engaging fantasy’.