The Nature of the Place: A Study of Great Plains Fiction by Diane Dufva Quantic (review)

Book Reviews89 There are two surprises in the presentation, one pleasing, one not. A preliminary chronology, separate from the biographical chapter, covers Valéry's personal and professional life without being dull. Putnam reports the scandal provoked by Valéry's acceptance speech to the Académie française and wryly recapitulates Nazi refusal to provide paper, in 1942, for the poet's Mauvaises pensées (Bad Thoughts), on the grounds that they would rather publish good ones. The index, however, is cumbersome, divided into three parts—proper names and subjects, poetic titles, prose titles —which are not easily identified. Professor Putnam's painstaking guidance, relating parts ofValéry's work to the whole and linking his preoccupations with those of other influential figures, from predecessors to contemporaries to later critics, renders this volume useful not only for the daunted, but for the sophisticated reader as well. This unpretentious yet highly sophisticated introduction to Valéry's life and works is clear, cogent, and elegant. This revisiting of a major literary figure will certainly benefit its target audience, but it will provide great pleasure for more seasoned readers as well. MARIE GLYNN Washington State University DIANE DUFVA QUANTIC. The Nature of the Place: A Study of Great Plains Fiction. Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1995. 203 p. 1 hough the Great Plains have often been viewed pejoratively as the "Great American Desert," or seen through the Depression lens as the "Dust Bowl," the region has produced a rich and enduring literature, one that reflects back the true abundance and complexity of the place while it also transcends locale to speak to the experiential heart of America. Diane Quantic has already done much to argue the density and durability of the region's literary heritage; in this new book, she presents that case in its full dimension. As the author shows, mythical renditions of the heartland have long governed the popular and critical discourse about it. Awed and discomfited by the vast open spaces and arid flatlands of the plains, and shaped by a cultural credo that valued domestication and cultivation of the land into ordered farmsteads, early comers to the region set about filling the geographical vacancy that they saw before them, managing space in 160 acre parcels, and striving to convert the terrain to a fruitful garden. The disparity between their preconceptions and the world they found, the clash between their romantic ideals of yeomanry and the natural conditions that constrained their efforts—these tensions become the consistent focus of the region's writings. Quantic's study is meant to probe Great Plains literature at the intersection of fable, history, and individual experience, addressing the ways key 90Rocky Mountain Review writers of fiction and autobiographical narrative come to terms with the impact of settlement experience on persistent westering myths. Chapters are organized around the defining myths (such as the West as Desert, Garden, Virgin Land, Safety Valve, or Manifest Destiny) that constructed the region in the popular imagination, beguiled homesteaders there, and evolved to accommodate the realities of life and community. In this context, Quantic surveys a sizable number of texts, ranging from the stories of well-known authors like Cooper, Garland, Sandoz, Cather, Rolvaag, and Stegner to the less familiar narratives of worthy writers like Larry Woiwode, Mildred Walker, Margaret Laurence, Bess Streeter Aldrich, and others. Some authors whose work has been underappreciated or critically ignored—such as Laura Ingalls Wilder, Wright Morris, and Lois Hudson—are approached freshly and given substantive attention and astute readings that are long overdue. Quantic's discussion is persuasive and engaging. Her exploration of the prevailing conceptual paradigms of the Western plains is articulate and incisive , and her own personal history as a daughter of and dweller in the region lends the authenticity of lived experience to her accounts of the landscape, weather, social mores, linguistic habits, and psychic predilections ofits people. She captures both the grand sweep and the small intricacies of diurnal life that regional writers convey, and underlines the centrality of the land to the worlds they replicate and imagine. At the same time, she rightfully acknowledges the multiplicity of imaginative responses to a place that is itself diverse and...