We often talk about the old-fashioned novel, a genre that has all but disappeared from the lists of quality fiction. What we mean by the term is a storytelling novel, peopled with characters who are quickly established in our minds: No ambiguity exists about what is happening or who is acting or why. The old-fashioned novelist tells us everything he knows about his story, and it is usually enough to satisfy our curiosity. His narrative has a beginning, a middle, and an end that strikes the reader as both inevitable and complete. Old-fashioned fiction is "well-made," to use a term often applied to the plays of the French dramatist Sardou.

Ward Just writes this kind of novel and has apprenticed himself to his craft in the traditional way…. [A Family Trust] is his latest, fully realized old-fashioned novel. It remains to be seen whether he can restore our taste for its special kind of pleasure….

The narrative often moves slowly, almost ponderously—though it is always very thorough in detail—as it goes through three generations. The novel has at least three "heroes"; the newspaper itself, the town of Dement, fighting against the advances of progress and development; and the Rising family, held together for a while by Amos's powerful conservative dicta until without the founder's unilateral vision, it finally disintegrates. A fourth hero is perhaps the individualistic Middle West, holding out against the little foxes of commerce and the blandishments of the corporate East.

The essential conservatism of the heroes makes A Family Trust a story of American values in the tradition of the early twentieth-century American novel. Its moral roots are strong, and the reader finds himself on the side of Amos Rising and Dement and furiously opposed to the evils of encroaching Chicago, its "aggression, its heat and energy and money." We pull along with Townsend and Amos for small-town honor and virtue…. Against all logic we find ourselves hoping that Charles (the son who's taken over the Intelligencer) will not sell the paper to outside interests and that Dana (the novel's beautiful and intelligent heroine) will somehow give up her unconventional life as a New York editor and take on the running of the paper. But of course it cannot be. The old order is defeated, the town has been permanently invaded by development and big business. The picturesque old bog becomes a housing development, and the newspaper loses its independence.

I have called A Family Trust old-fashioned. It is, not only in form and in character but also in its defense of the old American virtues—decency, honesty, smallness, independence, faithfulness to family, trust in friends, and patriotism for town and country. These things are past worrying about: For many of us the battle has long since been lost. For towns like Dement, the war against ugliness and bigness is over, but we can enjoy accounts of the battle in novels like Ward Just's.