Book Reviews
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.
Thomas Keneally - New York Times Book Review
The kind of book a reader sinks into completely.... The characters are so compelling, the setting so detailed, so convincing, so absolutely complete.... The Living is an extraordinary accomplishment, one of those rare occasions when the written word results through the magic and talent of the author in the creation of the whole world
Boston Sunday Globe
The Living is an impressive piece of fiction and a riveting hunk of history.... The many readers who have been drawn in the past to Dillard's work for its elegant and muscular use of language won't be disappointed in these pages.... She has given herself a landscape large enough to challenge her talents.
Los Angeles Times
Pulitzer Prize-winner Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974) turns her hand to fiction with this historical novel of the American Northwest in the late 19th century. Focusing on the settlement at Whatcom on Bellingham Bay (near Puget Sound), Dillard offers a compelling portrait of frontier life. The novel has a large and richly varied cast of characters, from the engaging frontiersman Clare Fishburn and Eastern socialite-turned-pioneer Minta Honer to the disturbed and violent Beal Obenchain and kleptomaniac Pearl Sharp. The Living is unflinching in its delineations of pioneer life at its worst and best—racism and brutality on the one hand and optimism and charity in adversity on the other. Dillard's view of "the living" in its many senses is a fine novel that is an essential purchase for all fiction collections. — Dean James, Houston Acad. of Medicine/Texas Medical Center Library.
Library Journal
The popular Pulitzer-winning Dillard (An American Childhood, 1987, The Writing Life, 1989, etc.) has come up with a novel at last—a panoramic and engrossing re-creation of 19th-century pioneer life in the Pacific Northwest—complete with gentlemanly gold miners, avuncular railroad speculators, misty-eyed sweethearts, assorted schemers and dreamers, and even a three-card- monte player or two. Ada and Rooney Fishburn were barely into their early 20s when they set off by covered wagon for the untamed western coastland just south of Canada. Youthful ignorance and optimism proved to be their greatest assets, though, as they arrived at Whatcom, a minuscule settlement in Bellingham Bay, and threw themselves into a lifelong battle against the physical hardship, grueling labor, and frequent tragedies of frontier life. With the help of other settlers and a tribe of friendly Lummi Indians, the Fishburns managed to survive—long enough to watch with amazement as gold, railroads, and real estate brought undreamed-of fortune and calamity to their isolated shore. By the time the two surviving Fishburn sons were grown, an ever-increasing influx of shopkeepers, politicians, and entrepreneurs arriving from the Midwest, the East Coast, and Europe had quickened the rhythms of the town sufficiently to send all of Whatcom's fortunes reeling. New personalities joined the fray, including John Ireland Sharp, the soul-searching school principal forever marked by the poverty he witnessed in New York City; Minta and June Randall, Baltimore heiresses who bet their hearts and their inheritances on this coastland; Johnny Lee, a Chinese railway worker whose younger brother was deliberately drowned; andbrooding, depraved Beal Obenchain, who toyed with his fellow settlers' psyches as a form of recreation. As usual in Dillard's work, sparkling prose and striking insights abound, though a tendency toward overdescription, plus a certain emotional distance from her many characters—who must regularly vacate the stage to let others have a turn—take some of the power out of her punch. Otherwise: a triumph of narrative skill and faithful research—headed for success.
Kirkus Reviews