i give it two stars for the gentle, thorough, and consistently engaging prose, which drew me in despite my growing qualms about the book as i read. (although i should note that this praise doesn't hold for the final chapter, which felt like an incongruous cop-out). stegner explores the potentially fascinating intersections of several themes--manifest destiny, history, individualism, pride and gender roles, to name a few--but he does so with the painfully dated social conservatism of his narrator's voice (the book was first published in 1970). while stegner's storytelling takes a slightly more critical bent than its narrator and principal characters ever do, nonetheless the book reads a bit too much like a wistful eulogy for the good ol' US institutions of marriage, pioneers, capitalist exploitation, gentility, land removal and racism.