SOURCE: "When the Bears Turned into Frenchmen," in The New York Times Book Review, September 6, 1992, p. 14.

In the following review, Thornton claims that the bulk of historical background material Vollmann includes in Fathers and Crows dilutes much of the novel's power.

William T. Vollmann's gargantuan Fathers and Crows is the second in a projected series of seven novels collectively titled Seven Dreams, which he says will form "a book of North American landscapes" and "a symbolic history of North America from its earliest days." The first volume, The Ice-Shirt, published in 1990, examined the 10th-century conflict between American Indians and Norse Greenlanders. Fathers and Crows is set in the 17th century as Jesuit priests begin their work of converting the Indians to Christianity. Weighing in at just over three pounds, Fathers and Crows includes 869 pages of footnote-, map- and drawing-studded text. Six glossaries, a chronology, a source list and...