The Town

Sayward Luckett walked into the Ohio wilderness as a girl in The Trees, cleared a farm and raised a family in The Fields, and in this final volume she is an old woman watching the settlement she helped hack out of the forest become Americus, a county seat with brick houses, a canal and pretensions. She is rich now, in land she sells off parcel by parcel, and profoundly unsure what the whole triumph was for.

The novel belongs half to her and half to her youngest son. Chancey is frail, dreamy and convinced from childhood that he cannot be these people's child; his one attachment is to Rosa Tench, a girl from the poor side of town whose mother had once been the local schoolmistress, and neither of them knows what the town knows, that Rosa is his half sister from his father's old affair. The town's cruelty about it drives Rosa to suicide, and Chancey out: he lands in Cincinnati as a newspaper editor of advanced opinions, writing columns against the pioneer myth and against his own family's kind.

Richter plays the argument fair. Chancey's case against the hardship worship of his elders is allowed real force, and Sayward's memory of what the clearing actually cost stands against it, and the book ends, as the Civil War gathers, with a reconciliation built on a secret: the failing newspaper Chancey despised his family from was funded, anonymously, by his mother.

Around two hundred and eighty pages, plain and quietly moving; it stands alone, though the trilogy is better whole.

Best for readers who want the American frontier followed one lifetime past the frontier, into the question of what the children owe it.