ot really a novel, as Gertrude Stein's narrator says-"not just an ordinary kind of novel with a plot and conversations to amuse you"-but an attempt at a thorough and exacting distillation of the essential properties of peoples' behavior. Through sentences that seem to repeat themselves, we are presented, on the surface, with a portrait of the "simple middle class monotonous tradition" as enacted by generations of the Dehning and Hersland families and their acquaintances. Underneath this is a slow, sieved attempt at something like total knowledge, an excavation of an overwhelming impulse "to understand the complete being in each one and all the details of their coming to have in them their kind of feeling...anything in them that gives to them inside them the feeling of being distinguished to themselves inside them."