[The thirteen sketches in "The Friendly Persuasion"] have all the virtues … that a series, well written, may possess, and all the limitations. To take the limitations first, the effect of the book is episodic rather than cumulative…. [For] all the charm and evocative tenderness that flow through these stories, they seem none the less to be enacted inside a vacuum…. [The] sense of time and history is not upon the book.

The Birdwells are poised fabulously in the midst of space…. We know their clapboard house and their fruit trees, their wagon, their geese. But from this focus, gently misted as the cameraman sometimes screens a lens for soft outline, the rest of the scene blurs as the eye moves outward. We see other figures, hear sounds, but they are neither sharp nor recognizable. This is legend instead of local color. It might be Delaware or Ohio; it...