[In the following review of The Living, Keneally praises Dillard's style and tone.]

Annie Dillard, a poet and essayist whose nonfiction work has won the Pulitzer Prize, has moved to fiction now with an invigorating, intricate first novel, The Living. Here she displays everything a person could need to know about what befell the Lummi, Skagit and Nooksack Indians between 1855 and the end of the last century; everything about European and Asian settlement in the Washington Territory in the same period; everything about tree felling, hops farming, railroad fever, land speculation, fashion, politics and education in the Bellingham Bay region in the extreme northwest corner of the United States.

At first, the reader might think that the celebration of the setting is the most important part of the book, that this is to be a hymn to the peculiar frontier passages, enthusiasms and griefs of the community of Whatcom on Bellingham Bay. Ms. Dillard so frankly cherishes her material that we are willing to forgive what, at first, seems a peremptory narrative pace. The passage of time seems so brisk, in fact, that a sort of anxiety is momentarily induced. How can the material last the narrator near to 400 pages?

For example, we are at first merely told that young Ada Fishburn has buried her 3-year-old boy child, Charley, crushed by the wagon wheels, under a lone tree on the Oregon Trail in earth thickly sown with the bones of earlier, unhappy voyagers. We are also told in a few sentences how Rooney Fishburn, Ada's husband, digging a well on their small, misty claim among the Douglas firs, asphyxiates when his shovel strikes a pocket of gas. An Englishman, a former manservant who goes to help Rooney, perishes just as instantly. The narrative moves from 1855 to 1872 in a few crammed paragraphs.

Ms. Dillard deals with an entire population as briskly as she deals with the Fishburns. Young John Ireland Sharp's entire family, parents and siblings, drown when their skiff sinks off Madrone Island near Puget Sound. "It seemed to him that his submerged family listed north and gestured towards Lummi Island every day when the sea flooded in from the Strait of Juan de Fuca…. They swayed like singers in a chorus under the pillars of the sea…. God pinned people under the sea among crabs." Again, in the style of the book, this event is bluntly announced. "It was in May that the Sharp family met with an accident; they drowned, except for John Ireland."

Not even William Kennedy's grand, roistering novel of 19th-century Albany, Quinn's Book, travels so headlong and produces such anxieties of pace.

The reader is quickly taught, however, to have more faith in Annie Dillard's tremendous gift for writing in a genuinely epic mode. For the action of The Living is cyclical, returning again and again to events, imbuing them with poignancy. The wealth of cherished detail is met in full by a wealth of cherished character. No fake suspense in Annie Dillard's writing. Instead the same incident enriches us over and over again.

Her writing has another extraordinary quality that is, in fact, the whole point of her narrative. She convinces us of, rather than simply positing, the fragility of the lives of all her people. This is, above all, why we remain fascinated for all the length of this strange and marvelous account. The indigenous crab of this foggy rainy region stands as a symbol of the tenuousness of life, the omnipresence of death. It eats the face of Lee Chin, an unhappy Chinese man tethered to a pier in a rising tide by the scholarly hermit Beal Obenchain. In turn, a crab scurries from the boots of the possibly murdered Obenchain.

Death's pincers work on the forested shore too. "Men died from trafficking in superior forces, like rivers and horses, bulls, steam saws, mill gears, quarried rock, or falling trees or rolling logs. Women died in rivers, too, and under trees and rockslides, and men took fevers, too, and fevers took men." Everywhere the tribes of the dead press in on the living and work at their memories. The widowed Minta Honer goes to meet her parents, Senator and Mrs. Green Randall, at the pier, and while she is gone two of her children are consumed in flame. Nooksack Indians must rid her of these ghosts, squeezing them from her body, starting with her shoulders, ending with her feet.

Beneath such shadows, enthusiasms flare riotously. The account begins with the Fraser River gold rush in 1858, just 18 miles away in British Columbia, and ends with the Klondike rush of 1897. Hearing of the Klondike strike, Pearl Sharp, enjoying a picnic on Madrone Island with her reclusive, bewildered husband, cries, "Let's go home, troops. Hard times is over."

Amid flux and loss, people have time to be worldly. The advice girls were given was "to marry a man from New England, for New England men treated their wives right fine…. And by all means arrange to become a man's second wife, at least: the previous wife will have accomplished the back-breaking labor of improving his claim."

None of this prevents Senator Randall's second daughter, June, from marrying the apparently feckless Clare Fishburn, or prevents beautiful young Grace, who keeps house for a Seattle madam, Old Mother Damnable, from marrying Clare's intense, surly brother Glee.

Just as ill-advisedly, socialists and unionists so forget the dream of brotherhood as to expel or murder the Celestials (the Chinese), who, with the Terrestrials (the Irish), are the great railroad builders of the day.

And every time there is a rumor of Whatcom becoming a railway terminus or a center for Japanese trade, real estate booms and speculation and its attendant angel, embezzlement, seize the civic soul. People lose faith in society, ideology, brothers, spouses, God—but never their faith in a boom time. Only a few stand back from the fever: John Ireland, the disabused socialist schoolteacher, and Beal Obenchain, who lives in the millennium-old stump of a giant cedar. Having taken possession of the soul of a calf that he strangled in his boyhood, Obenchain now plans to take possession of the soul of one of his fellow citizens, a possession which has nothing to do with real estate, which is not on the temporal plane.

Ms. Dillard's tale is packed with oddity of character and incident. For oddity of character, try the Pullman conductor Tommy Cahoon, who survived being scalped by the Sioux while fishing in Wyoming. For oddity of incident, try the scene in which Eustace Honer chooses his moment to raise his concern with the Nooksack chief, Kulshan Jim, that the Indians treat their women too harshly, working them like mules. He finds that Kulshan Jim is thereby free to raise his concern about the way "the Bostons" treat their women, striking them in anger. "All the Nooksacks pitied the Boston women—pitied them! he said softly …—whose houses were long journeys apart, who worked alone, got hit, and died young."

What is more important than any of this, and harder to convey, is the way Annie Dillard gives weight to every detail. The Living is an August celebration of human frenzy and endurance. Her living are hectically alive, her dead recur in furious memory. And Annie Dillard, sometimes by an apparent crabwise indirection but with utter thoroughness, proves herself a fine novelist.