SOURCE: "Beneath the Wheels of Progress," in New York Times, May 3, 1992, p. 9.

In the following review of The Living, Keneally praises Dillard's style and tone.

Annie Dillard, a poet and essayist whose nonfiction work has won the Pulitzer Prize, has moved to fiction now with an invigorating, intricate first novel, The Living. Here she displays everything a person could need to know about what befell the Lummi, Skagit and Nooksack Indians between 1855 and the end of the last century; everything about European and Asian settlement in the Washington Territory in the same period; everything about tree felling, hops farming, railroad fever, land speculation, fashion, politics and education in the Bellingham Bay region in the extreme northwest corner of the United States.

At first, the reader might think that the celebration of the setting is the most important part of the book, that this is to be a hymn...