"The Life I Really Lived," a sort of female Odyssey, leads to a struggle between powerful forces. The I of the story is not Jessamyn West, but a writer named Orpha, after Orpheus. Orpha passes through traumas of a Middle Western childhood into two disastrous, though quite different marriages. (p. 16)

Jessamyn West, surely the most deceptively homey of writers, uses small-town life to convey human events that warm the heart and awaken instant sympathy. Yet there are clues, hints, that what she is telling is a hard truth….

Although it is intensely realistic, the novel in fact takes place within the territory of fiction—that landscape, instantly recognizable to the aficionado as real but not the same as a physical Middle West, an actual California. To this extent (and no other) it resembles a dream, with all the characters contributory to the observing, absorbing, imitative dreamer.

"The Life...