Ordinary People is a quite good but thoroughly conventional novel that reads, in fact, like the old-pro product of an intelligent, thoroughly practiced veteran. Ms. Guest's hardly unorthodox subject is a middle-class American family from the Middle West. Make that upper-middle-class….

Picking up the story after Conrad returns home [from a mental hospital], Ms. Guest deals with love and hate, forgiveness and the lack of it, madness and death—the themes appropriate to Greek tragedy. But she must deal with them in the terms of the well-made suburban novel. Panic equals the rattle of father's ice cube in one-too-many martinis. Despair equals the hundred small ways a Christmas Day falls apart, even when the keys to a new Le Mans for Conrad lie under the tree. Loneliness gets spelled out in the instructions on a frozen TV dinner.

The author writes almost too unerringly clever dialogue. Everything is...