[With The Woods] David Plante has done something, in a literary sense, odd. He has taken the cast of two earlier novels, The Country and The Family and put them back in time, to the days when Daniel Francoeur was still a boy….

From the earlier novels we know the Francoeurs as French Canadians, parents and sons struggling to hold together as a family while growing apart; we know the father, senile and dying; we know Daniel, adult, a writer. Here, in The Woods he is adolescent, a first year college boy, at that moment in time when every sensation prickles, when trees look greener and words seem more full of meaning. It is summer, at the lake, the first summer of seduction.

David Plante is an elegant writer, adopting here an intentional heartlessness of tone, very effective as a preservative of the past, and stopping short, if...