Most people remember John Knowles as the author of A Separate Peace, a brief, enormously popular novel which searchingly studied the lives of two boys on the brink of adulthood. The writing was low-keyed, but it seemed to capture perfectly the quicksilver mental atmosphere of that stage of adolescence. In A Vein of Riches, Knowles turns to a different subject—the expansion and collapse of the "King Coal" industry in West Virginia from 1909 to 1924—and to a new genre—a Dreiserian chronicle of people and power. He seems very knowledgeable about the subject and rather uncomfortable with the form….

[The southern coal industry is portrayed] through the adventures of the Catherwood family, one of the small dynastic groups at the pinnacle of this terribly American boom society, and they are, unfortunately, transparent devices….

Further, the narrative point of view shifts often and abruptly from one character to another...