The greatest difficulty, says Daniel, the narrator of David Plante's new book, is "to write, not about what I feel and think, but what someone else does." The whole of The Country is an expression of that struggle with the silent undertow of other people's emotions. Inevitably perhaps, since its subject is the numbing grief grown children feel as they watch their parents descend into helplessness and death.

There is almost no plot. Daniel returns three times from his self-imposed exile in London to the family home in Providence, Rhode Island…. His last visit is to bury his father and console his mother, although she seems curiously revivified, freed at last from a difficult marriage. In between, there is a flashback to an abortive reunion of Daniel, his parents, and six brothers at the family's country cottage….

Family life, Plante seems to imply is … a mixture of strangeness...