Books: In Upper New York

THE BIG BARN—Walter D. Edmonds—Little, Brown ($2).

Unlike most novels by young men, The Big Barn is solid, careful, mature. Like Author Edmonds' first book it tells of a countryside he knows but of a time long before he was born.

Old Ralph Wilder, self-made patriarch, has spent his aggressive life patching together acres of farm and forest land in upper New York State. By the time his family is grown up he owns or controls the whole Black River Valley. The local aristocracy will not accept him, but he scorns them; it is his...