Beyond the Bedroom Wall …, an enormously overlong tribute to the tender web of family relationships and the powerful endurance of the past in the present, is sometimes moving, more often exhausting. It is, basically, a conventional American epic of restless mobility and disappointed expectations, with the generations shifting from a secure rural environment imbued with faith and industry to the more unstable, relentless pursuit of change and displacement for their own sake….

Rather than unfolding [his] family saga in a conventional linear narrative, Woiwode presents a series of frozen episodes and tableaux told in different voices, scrambling with harsh abruptness distant moments of time (Woiwode calls them still pictures from a family album) in a collage of childhood and maturity, joy and tragedy, life and death. The choppy dissociation of names and places and people, of scattered, deceptively isolated incidents, are meant as clues to the unspoken coherence...