Part prose, part poetry, and including a selection of Murphy's father's memoirs of his own childhood in the same harsh North Dakota farm country, the book is an evocation of a place the author knows well. We come to see, obliquely, that it's a lonely, hard place. We come to see, more clearly, that Murphy is a lonely, hard man.

          He begins with a short poem, "The Godless Sky." It's rhymed and somewhat technically adroit; yet emotionally underdeveloped. In it, Murphy surveys the scene from a small plane flying over his family's lands, which have been ruined by a flood. He ends the twelve lines by telling us, "An uncle stauncher than I/ bears the cross/ of another loss/ under the godless sky." We're left with little but a sort of wistful sympathy—too bad for the uncle—and a vague curiosity: What does Murphy himself think or feel, up there in the Godless, but not Timothy Murphy-less sky?
          This same lack of emotional engagement, imagination, and, it seems, curiosity, pervades much of the book, especially the prose sections. Murphy doesn't seem to know what to emphasize in his stories about his family—people get a quick line or two and then are dropped. Here, for example, is what he says about his relationship with his grandmother: "...I was Tessie's first grandchild. We were extremely close, and I was steeped in her tales of struggle. Most children told of the bad old days squirm and close their ears; but I listened, and those stories haunt me still." And...? we think, waiting to hear one, but that's all we get.

          In the next paragraph, he skips to his mother and father's relationship. He tells us his father "met a beauty from Duluth, an aspiring actress who took the leads in university theatrical productions. His fate was sealed when he saw her play Lady Macbeth. To this day he looks at her and mutters, "Screw your courage to the sticking point." I suppose it's a family joke, but at least once, it must have been witty. What if he said it, for example, while she was changing a diaper or about to greet a difficult guest? But we never know, for on Murphy skims, to say that "Mother's prospective career was derailed when she bore five children in six years. In retrospect her sacrifice and devotion seem so daunting to us all that none of us has emulated her. Like so many of our fellow Boomers, we have small families or none, and we put our careers first. Yet we sometimes wonder what we're missing."

           This last paragraph is a sort of masterpiece of unexamined assertion. The questions it raises are at the heart of the writing of a book like this—questions of motivation and interaction, of self knowledge and knowledge of others, of the forces of place and culture at work on us. Why did his mother have so many children so quickly? Were her reasons religious? Did she seem to regret the decision? Did she, intentionally or not, cause her children feel responsible for it? To say that you consider your mother's sacrifice and devotion so daunting that you couldn't possibly imitate her is to imply a great deal, but the weak cliché Murphy uses at the end renders the story pointless. If he ever even considered any of these questions, we aren't to know.

           Here's the last thing he has to say about his mother for many pages: "Each summer at our lake cottage, forty miles to the east, Mother staged performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream with her offspring, and in the winter she organized children's theater companies to tour tiny North Dakota towns. Though I inherit my passion for literature from both sides of the family, it was my mother who introduced me to Shakespeare at the age of seven."