Religion or, better still, grace is the pervading force in [The Family], framing a story direct and simple in its outward manifestations. But the simplicity and apparent plainness contain a power that finally erupts—converging into that imponderable force which keeps men together in spite of their own likes and dislikes, which accounts for the inexplicable suffering they undergo in this world, and which transmits the messages of the dead to the living. Grace, expressed in humble prayer, imparts an unusual glow to the author's style and heightens the chronicle of a small Canadian town to a cogent, delicate pitch.

The Jamesian eye of The Family is Daniel, a child morbidly interested in universalizations, in the perfection of the body, in the taunted and mangled figure of the crucified Christ. Thirsty for anonymity and innocence, Daniel is the imaginative poet through whose mind the feelings and thoughts of...