The world of David Plante's Francoeur family is male and foreign. It is a world of silences, of baffled and balked love, of pain borne stoically, of Indian cruelties and natural ties, of French Catholic pieties and the bleak light of failed New England cities. David Plante began the story of the Francoeurs … in his brilliant novel "The Family."… He continues their history in his equally superb "The Country."…

The ghost of Stephen Dedalus, that professional writer-son, broods over "The Country," for the novel is, among other things, the portrait of the artist as a young man. Yet if Stephen Dedalus is here, he is a kinder Stephen, and more merciful. Regret for the gulf between son and father, brother and brother, mother and son provides the dark color of David Plante's prose, but the regret is entirely untinged by contempt. That his family will never understand what...