You might call [the writing in "Plains Song"] linoleum nostalgia. It is something like going through your grandmother's family album and trying to imagine what was not photographed.

While you read it, you wonder whether this era of our history can have been quite as stark as Mr. Morris makes it sound, or whether he is not practicing something like Minimalist art or the theater of poverty. Were people so really unconscious? There is always a temptation to think that the author failed to penetrate them.

Six feet tall, resembling Abraham Lincoln, flat as an ironing board and with eyes like a Russian icon, Cora Atkins is "implacable," just as almost all fictional wives in novels about the Midwest at the turn of the century are implacable, if they are not nymphomanic or insane. Cora is not only implacable, but mysterious, and as F. R. Leavis said about...