["Dwell in the Wilderness"] chronicles the fortunes of a middle-class family in Michigan from 1876 to 1925. Both time Alvah Bessie 1904– Photograph by Martha G. Frias; courtesy of Alvah Bessieand scene have special significance for the theme of the tale. For the parents are representatives of that sterile emotional moralism which, though it had healthy roots in New England, grew both impotent and hysterical as successive generations moved across central New York, upper Ohio, and southern Michigan. The mother, Amelia, the most imposing figure in the book, unscrupulously uses the selfish sentimentality and meaningless piety which this tradition offered its women, to destroy her husband's vitality and to dominate the lives of her children….

Mr. Bessie is shrewdest in picturing the smothered ambivalent relationships of parents and children…. [Although] this relationship is central to the book, Mr. Bessie has also interested himself in depicting the flowing panorama of the...