L'Amour's family sagas with their reappearing characters and depiction of a historical era in a particular region have many predecessors, including the sagas of James Fenimore Cooper, Honore de Balzac, Emile Zola, Anthony Trollope, John Galsworthy, William Dean Howells, and Francis Marion Crawford. Of this group L'Amour most resembles Balzac and Zola. Like Balzac, L'Amour uses reappearing characters and "indeterminacy" (he leaves gaps in the stories of the various generations of the family which the reader must imaginatively fill in). Also like Balzac, L'Amour shifts narrative point of view between novels and sometimes within the novel (one chapter in Jubal Sackett is told from Itchakomi's point of view, the rest from Jubal's) to show various reactions to the same events and ideas.

L'Amour resembles Zola in Zola's dramatization of families through generations and, specifically, Zola's use of inherited characteristics. Jubal, like his father and Lila, has...