The country may not be exactly drooling with hunger for another novel about "Westering," but Evan Hunter, in ["The Chisholms"] evokes some freshness from the tritest materials and focuses our concern on complex, often perverse, human beings rather than on the vacuous panoramic vista that too often dominates this genre. When the Chisholm family pull out of barren Virginia in 1844 and head doggedly for the promised land, they do not automatically become archetypes, rendered featureless by the author's grim determination to make some Big Statement about the pioneering spirit of our hardy forefathers or how Noble Women Helped to Win the West. (p. 42)

This family may be the center of the action, but the action itself is familiar if not hackneyed by now. "The Chisholms" contains just about every standard ingredient of frontier narrative…. But Mr. Hunter still plays fair by judicious proportioning: the buffalo gallop for only...