[The Immigrants] slides down easily, like a friendly if unexceptional Napa wine. All the elements of popular American mythology are offered up for tasting….

The characters of this novel are doers, as Fast never tires of pointing out, and are little given to introspection. The mildly annoying conceit that people "do what they do" because they "are what they are" serves ultimately as a rationalization for the fact that the first generation parvenus are wrecked financially, while the entrenched class of Seldons survives….

This is almost a nineteenth-century European vision of America: Lavette sought to rise above his economically and ancestrally determined place. He had neither religion, past, nor, indeed, a whole self to justify the repudiation of his origins. Fast does a yeomanlike if predictable job of tracing the arc of this iron determinism.

Stephan Salisbury, "Books in Brief: 'The Immigrants'," in Saturday Review (copyright © 1977 by Saturday...