SOURCE: "None Abiding." in Belles Lettres, Vol. 8, No. 1. Fall, 1992, pp. 22-3.

In the following review of The Living, Ganz praises Dillard's ability to find meaning in ordinary settings.

With Annie Dillard's first novel [The Living], a frontier saga of life along the Puget Sound during the latter 19th century, the Pacific Northwest has been given its Willa Cather. Dillard's pioneers, like Cather's, are drawn against a powerful landscape, but instead of the bright, horizontal immensities of Cather's prairies, Dillard sets her characters down in the dark, towering Pacific rain forests, where 200-foot Douglas firs grow as "close as grass" and as "thick as buildings."

Measured against these giant trees, human beings are fragile things, and it seems the burden of Dillard's narrative, right from the start, to make the reader experience this fragility. In the opening scene, Ada Fishburn surveys this "rough edge of the world" to which...