The crammed two pews contain every life-stage from terminal disablement through alcoholic corpulence, deep-lined sun damage, gym-hardened muscularity, spa-enhanced svelteness, teen-age bloom and sudden growth spurt, adolescent squirminess and giggliness, childish pudginess suffocatingly wrapped in boredom, toddler stupefaction and imminent tantrum, on down to the recently baptized infant sleeping in milky bliss on her young mother’s lap. The Wainthrops form a synoptic image of life’s tragic progress, but it is an image overlaid with graciousness, mannerliness, and tribal consciousness of a value greater than the sum of its parts. Not for the rich the scattered wandering, the flight from the ill-equipped nuclear family into America’s wasteland of tawdry entertainments, of shopping-mall parking lots as large as lakes and seedy roadside bars advertising karaoke on Wednesday nights, of deserted downtowns and razed forests, of roving job to job and mate to mate, amid such meagre electronic distractions as heist movies featuring car wrecks and fireballs and television comedies that reflect as in a fuzzy, fizzing mirror the awkward comedy of our desperate daily improvisations beyond the ordering principles of church, village, and family hierarchy. Only the rich—and not all of them, for some turn rebellious and others topple through self-neglect into lower castes—can afford the old structures that carry us from cradle to grave, well-fed, well-clothed, and well-respected. To Owen, an only child most intensely himself when engrossed in coded conversation with the coolly burning face of a cathode-ray tube, the interlocking clans of Haskells Crossing are paradigms of community, a web spun stronger than as of steel. The women are mostly of Anglo-Saxon blood—fair, with forthright warrior jaws—and the men so big-boned they look a touch sheepish in their tailored business suits. However, the web has snared, here and there, brides of Asian or Latin blood, and grooms recruited from swarthier races—the Jewish lawyer, the Italo-American bond salesman—to keep the gene pool fresh.