Their Yesterdays

A man and a woman look back over the thirteen periods of a life — dreams, occupation, knowledge, ignorance, religion, love, life, death — in a book that is barely a novel and openly a meditation. Wright preached in Ozark churches until his health failed, then wrote novels that outsold everyone and became the first American author to earn a million dollars from fiction. This is the quietest thing he did. Fifty-eight plates of quiet interiors and reading figures by painters such as Thomas Dewing and Edvard Munch, from 1884 to 1925, keep the book's meditative mood before the eye.