Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature (review)

As the book's title suggests, Tom Lynch loves the desert. In his study of nature writing and place-based literatures of the US Southwest, Lynch fuses personal reflections on desert landscape with an ecocritical examination of literature's role in the human/environment relationship. The book contributes to the bioregionalist philosophy that natural environment remains the most authentic indicator of regional and geographic identity.

The first two chapters of the book focus on literatures of particular geographic regions. Chapter 1, "Acequia Culture," explores water and irrigation in the upper Rio Grande bioregion. The values attributed to water in this "acequia culture" have produced both political conflict and a rich body of literature. Drawing on works by Cleofas Jaramillo, Frank Waters, John Nichols, and Jimmy Santiago Baca, Lynch explores how various literatures address the area's bioregional identity—among the themes noted are colonialism, environmental justice, land management, and urbanization. Chapter 2, "Border (Home) Lands," explores the US-Mexico bioregion. Lynch explains how political conflict within the region and unusual features of desert landscape often advance characterizations of the area as dangerous, alien, and anarchic. Engaging the work of Charles Bowden, Susan Tweit, Ray Gonzalez, Pat Mora, and Gary Paul Nabhan, Lynch identifies attempts to create or make sense of "home" in the borderlands. He concludes with a subtle argument for replacing politically rendered notions of "area" with a concept borne out of bioregionalism, suggesting that the implications of this new approach might profoundly and valuably alter definitions of geopolitical identity.

The theme of perception frames the final two chapters, as Lynch investigates both things perceived and the human perceptual apparatus. In chapter 3, "Dignifying the Overlooked," Lynch turns to representations of invertebrates—spiders, butterflies, and various species of ants, to name a few. The works of Edward Abbey take center stage in this chapter, as Lynch contrasts Abbey's frustration with ants with the cosmologically fundamental status of invertebrates in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (1977). Lynch argues that these sometimes microscopic elements of landscape constitute an important aspect of bioregional representation. Chapter 4, "Re-Sensing Place," focuses on how both writers and readers use sensory perception to interpret the natural world. Lynch notes the "visual bias" often present in nature writing and explores the ways in which various texts appropriate and challenge the "camera lens" method of representation (184). He examines writers such as Janice Emily Bowers, whose work invokes "physical and sensual immersion into the natural world" (191).

Although Xerophilia addresses relatively few authors for a substantial monograph concerned with southwestern literature, the book compensates with depth for what it lacks in breadth. Fascinating for its content and its achievements as a scholarly endeavor, Lynch's work contributes to how we might redefine regional literature and approach regional classification from a new angle. By including his own photographs as well as descriptions of landscape that are as creative and engaging as the texts he addresses, Lynch also reinvents the genre of the critical monograph—Xerophilia colors the desert landscape as well as the enterprise of literary scholarship in a bold, new hue.