Books, Arts & Manners: Giants in the Mud

Dream West, by David Nevin (Putnam, 639 pp., $17.95)

Historical novels range from the shoddy to the respectable; the only thing they all have in common is a great many pages. Almost never literary events, they are often best-sellers, novels that instruct rather than delight and have more information than style. While David Nevin’s Dream West is certainly no literary event, it is Very Respectable, a rich and painless slice of American history for those unable or unwilling to read the real thing. It even comes with two pages of acknowledgments to the libraries where the author and his wife read documents before Nevin committed his own version of the life of John Charles Frémont to three reams of paper.

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Charles Nicol

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Dream West, by David Nevin (Putnam, 639 pp., $17.95)

Historical novels range from the shoddy to the respectable; the only thing they all have in common is a great many pages. Almost never literary events, they are often best-sellers, novels that instruct rather than delight and have more information than style. While David Nevin’s Dream West is certainly no literary event, it is Very Respectable, a rich and painless slice of American history for those unable or unwilling to read the real thing. It even comes with two pages of acknowledgments to the libraries where the author and his wife read documents before Nevin committed his own version of the life of John Charles Frémont to three reams of paper.