In THE WAY IT WENT, novelist Ben Schwartz weaves a beautifully elegiac history of a midwestern farm family from the 1930s to the present. Acknowledging that family histories are as much fiction as fact, the novel offers different voices and versions, mainly three erudite, articulate women, schoolteachers all. The chief character, Elspeth, begins the history: her childhood in Missouri, her years in college. And then, after World War II, meeting Avery,...