[Glenway Wescott's] main theme has been what might be called the Mid-Western version of the American's complex fate. For the greater part of the thirties Wescott was an expatriate, living in France, but, on the evidence of his fiction, still unable to escape from Wisconsin, his native state, which seems at times almost as much a state of mind as a place…. (p. 105)

Wescott's strength as a novelist lies in his very ambivalence towards his subject, and in his finest novel, The Grand-mothers …, it appears in depth and at length and with a nostalgia that is always controlled. The action flows between the present and the past; the novel is a discovery of the past, a coming to terms with it. It is in essence a young intellectual's imaginative reconstruction of the lives of his grandparents and their families and relations, pioneers in the opening up of Wisconsin...