In The Country [Plante's] almost obsessive search for the truth of human events and emotions does not flinch before a painful but universal theme: death in the family [in this case, the father's]…. There is, indeed, a good deal of repetition and dullness in the narrator's own words as he tries to tease out the exact truth of each situation…. There is, too, another dimension to the book, which gives it its title. Daniel [the narrator] is haunted by his father's Indian blood. Behind him he sees the shadow of generations of strange Indian women with mysterious knowledge and customs; and this blood-link creates, in Daniel's mind, a mystical fusion with nature so that in an almost Wordsworthian sense he can escape from the intolerable realities of his parents' house to the free mysterious world of the woods of which he and his father partake through their descent...