If you live with dreadful awareness of man's perplexity in the twentieth century …, then you will have a very disconcerting time trying to penetrate the simplistic world of Conrad Richter's hillbilly pastoral [The Grandfathers]….

[What] are we to make of an American short novel, so out-stripped by any meaning that we can look for in American life today, that it confronts us … with people called Granpap, Granmam, Ant Dib, Uncle Heb, Uncle Nun, Fox, Babe, Chick, Felty, Sip, Morg, Effie, and Chariter, the Daisy Mae heroine of all this slightly amusing rural shebang? Or what are we to make of such cliché chapter-opening sentences as, "Sunday morning came to Kettle Valley mild and clear after early fog." One means, does there have to be a Kettle Valley, even without the cinematic felicities of Ma and Pa?

To carp at such bland devices would seem, no doubt, to indicate...