AN AMERICAN MEMORY <i> by Eric Larsen (Anchor: $7.95) </i>

Eric Larsen’s promising first novel consists of a series of sketches tracing three generations of a Midwestern family. Although each character sees the events that shaped the family history from a slightly different perspective, they share a brooding, unhappy nature; their world is embodied in the dusty attic where the primary narrator discovers his aloof, angry father’s hidden past. Larsen’s haunting prose suggests more than it tells, and his sentences evoke the daunting sweep of the Great Plains and the winter winds that hammer the lonely Minnesota farmhouse, where his people live out their bitter lives.