[In the following review, DeVoto praises Roll River as a first-rate example of American realism but admits that the book will not likely find a wide audience.]

There are a number of ways to write that undefined entity, the American novel. Mr. Wolfe has recently exhibited one way: to print the word “America” ten thousand times, to depict young Faustus as a victim of manic-depressive insanity, to fill the stage with Mardi Gras grotesques who suffer from compulsion neuroses and walk on stilts and always speak as if firing by battery, to look at everything through the lens of an infantile regression which makes a Dutchess County kitchen or a glimpse of a way station on the main line equally important with the death of one's father and the first meeting with one's mistress and all of them frenetic, and to fluff up the material of fiction, one part, with ten parts of bastard blank verse ecstasy. I wonder if only an accident of the calendar led Scribners to hold Roll River till Of Time and the River was well launched, or whether capital investment may not have had something to do with the schedule. For Mr. Boyd now exhibits another way to write an American novel, and he wins by a number of Mormon blocks. (For the untraveled: they are 220 yards each.) His book is only 600 pages long, it contains not a single goat-cry, and no one beats his head or knuckles to a bloody pulp on any wall within its covers. But those pages are filled with characters who are hammered out of American experience, whose emotions are the bitter bread of us all, and who are directed and controlled by a superb technician.

The fact that Mr. Boyd has hitherto chiefly concerned himself with the American past has sometimes obscured his great merits as a realist behind the popular conception of historical fiction as romantic. He begins this essay in that hardest of all decades for contemporary novelists, the eighties, but after triumphantly integrating that period, he comes on down to the present. And now there can be no easy dismissal of him as a period novelist. He is a realist: one of the very few first-rank novelists of his generation and one of the foremost technicians.

Thomas Rand is dying in a hospital, having overstrained himself with a rescue-crew after an accident in a coal mine which he owns. In the flagging lethargy of his body, his mind is restless and, lying there, he tries to frame an orderly understanding of his own life and that of an aunt, the woman who on the whole has meant most to him. (With that simple instrumentality and two pages at the end of the first half of his book, Mr. Boyd accomplishes the time-symbolism to which Mr. Wolfe devotes a hundred thousand words.) His effort comprises fifty years and four generations of the Rand family. It creates twenty or thirty characters of the utmost brilliance. It also creates a community and a history—time vividly felt flowing through a city whose parts and castes and ages are completely integrated. It involves also an economics—mentioned here only to appease the young crusaders—and, what is much more important, the best presentation of the A. E. F. that has yet been printed. It is, in short, what a good novel must be: a novel made up of many novels which are fused so thoroughly that they are indistinguishable but which pile up significance many layers deep.

It brings to the understanding of human experience in fifty years of American life wit, subtlety, strength, profundity, and tenderness. Whether he is smiling at the Yale of Dink Stover's time, exploring a marriage between a romantic gentleman and a sexually ignorant woman, watching their nephew deal ignorantly with a frigid woman, casually checking deserters and fatalities in an attack, or examining the blend of timidity and disenchantment in middle age, Mr. Boyd knows his people down to the last symbol of their repressions. His detachment is at once clinical and kind—imaginative creation of the very highest order. To maintain it as sympathetically among the coquetries of the eighties as among the bewildered franknesses of the twenties is a feat of main strength. And to write dialogue which seems equally brilliant and equally from the idiom of its time through all those periods of flux is a performance which cannot be overpraised.

There is no great hope that it will be widely acclaimed in the press. Mr. Boyd writes about individuals instead of classes, and, what is worse, one of his characters speaks skeptically of Labor and another capitalist is displayed in a heroic action—so one-half of the cheerleaders will find him lacking in Zeitgeist. The other half will look in vain for the flatulent giantism which, at the moment, they hold to be the purest vision of America. But he has brilliantly written a searching, wise, and very profound novel about the people of our time and their heritage. His people and their triumphs and tragedies will not be forgotten by readers who classify fiction among the fine arts.