To read "Sons" is to read the just-published work of a serious novelist in a Joan Crawford movie. It covers thousands of miles and more than 60 years while unfolding the story of a 20th-century American family over three generations. But it is no mere rugged epic. It has an intellectual frame, like horn-rimmed glasses. Wat, Will and Bert Tyler take turns narrating the novel in the continuously repeated sequence of son, father, grandfather. This is meant to expose ironic twistings in the family line—and, or so one would have thought, differences between the narrators' voices. But the voices are one voice, and it belongs to one thousand writers. Its timbre is no less glib for being earnest as hell….

The Tylers' qualities are glued onto them because Evan Hunter wishes to show us what he supposes to be "typical" representatives of this century's generations in America. But for the typical to be convincing, they must first be specific. Hunter's types are designed for symmetry, not humanity.

Evan Hunter has an industrious research-eye. He knows what a Wisconsin town looked like early in the century, or a Mississippi Air Force base in 1944. He knows how many different kinds of things work, and the names and locations of many kinds of institutions.

As if it were also the result of diligent geographical research, his heart, too, is in the right place, which is to say on virtually everybody's moral map. An occasional scene in "Sons" is peculiar or intense, and thus absorbing, but for the most part there is so little to ponder in the behavior of Hunter's types, and so little mood in the film-clips of their environments, that the book moves at a steadily swift clip right up to the typewriter-bell of its painlessly tragic ending. The Story of Twentieth Century America from the Woods of Wisconsin to the Jungles of Vietnam is too small a subject for a novel without characters or ideas.