The lone civilian in a story peopled by an army of high-strung artistic types, Sophie responds to Kleban's phobias with warm common sense and returns his distrustful squints with a steady gaze.

Along with a timeless story peopled with vivid characters, from the villainous Morgan Le Fay (talk about dysfunctional children!)

In this book, though, he's conflated the two forms, unfolding a rueful, book-length take on a Deep South community in what are essentially a series of short stories peopled by loosely interrelated characters.

Dates, places, names, time lines, detailed lineages and elaborate theories will never do as substitutes for a good story peopled with believable characters.

The long prose fiction called the novel, for want of a better name, has yet to shake off the mandate of its own normality as promulgated in the 19th century: to tell a story peopled by characters whose options and destinies are those of ordinary, so-called real life.

In novels like "Time's Witness," Mr. Malone has written long, rather complicated stories peopled with dozens of characters, his favorites obviously being the most colorful.

It is a story peopled with eccentrics and naïfs and scoundrels, and a story recounted with uncommon acuity and wit.

It is a story peopled with picaresque characters and always revolving around recurring grand themes - a battle against the hostile elements, the advanced and adventurous spirit of the Vikings, the undercurrent of Christianity and the perennial struggle to be taken seriously as a sovereign, independent country.

The young man's own story, in fact - peopled by dropouts from the projects on one hand and go-along, get-along elders on the other (Ruby Dee plays a wise grandmother here) - is as finely drawn as Father Verrett's.