At his worst Woiwode is content to tell neat stories of children at hideous play that seem like many other New Yorker tales. But at his best he is marvelous, a real bringer of news, a writer in love with his world, who cares about the hurt it has given him as his inheritance, and honors and forgives it. Beyond the Bedroom Wall is a very long novel in which Woiwode has tried something unlikely and achieved something impressive.

He calls his book "A Family Album."… Woiwode's love for the Neumillers and for North Dakota—which is unashamedly a love for his own family and childhood home—is a matter of memory and reconstruction. He discovered at some point that he began to achieve his own life when his parents and grandparents achieved theirs, and an "album," a loosely connected series of pictures and episodes, is his way of honoring not only their achievement but his way of knowing it.

Does it sound a perfect formula for sentimentality? It is no more so than is "East Coker."… Like Eliot, Woiwode perceives a time for "the evening with the photograph album" and that "Love is most nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter." But where Eliot filtered and displaced his autobiographical sense of home and family, Woiwode succeeds by being personal, by putting his imagination at the service of memory, and by realizing in this way that love really is most nearly itself when the here and now cease to matter. (p. 31)

Woiwode is always evoking, but never in set pieces, and the links we get from episode to episode are never forced because they don't have to be. Home is where one starts from, and Woiwode's sense of home is strong enough to allow him to be relaxed and unself-conscious when he writes about winters and schools and sex and religion, and tries to make each one fully felt as lived….

[When] Woiwode comes to his own experience he begins to falter, and much of his account of the boyhoods of Jerome, Charles, and Tim (who seems closest to Woiwode himself) reads like anecdotal New Yorker stories…. Earlier the fact that Martin is somewhat less distinct than Alpha seems nothing more than a reflection of his being less distinctly a personality, and none the less important as a person. Later, especially after Alpha dies, Martin's fuzziness begins to suggest a loss of control by Woiwode….

Martin doesn't want to get ahead …, doesn't know why he wants to leave, and, we realize, Woiwode doesn't either, it seems. With this realization comes our first sense of the limits of Woiwode's making a novel out of a family album. The individual pieces that don't work, after all, are only that, and there are others right through to the end that are superb….

[A] kind of nostalgia has obviously been at work in Woiwide, a much more interesting and hard-working kind, a nostalgia for his family and for North Dakota before he was born. In order to imagine or reconstruct or remember this world, he has had to lay aside simple reminiscence, to find a real and vivid use for this nostalgia, and he has done so wonderfully. The moment he comes to himself, as it were, to his own more direct memories, his novelistic hold slackens….

I have no idea what "actually happened" to Larry Woiwode, or how much if any of this book is simply autobiographical. I am only trying to distinguish the impulses that seem to lie behind the two parts of his book, impulses that as I make them out seem related but crucially different. I want to make the distinction, furthermore, mostly out of gratitude to Woiwode for all he has achieved here…. Knowing how possessiveness and pride and fear were barriers to feeling, Woiwode breaks through the barriers and is able to feel and make us feel what those people experience. It may be one of the last books we'll get that can do this. (p. 32)