Rolvaag: His life and Art by Paul Reigstad (review)

Reviews 305 Louis may be expected to continue on the dismal downhill path o f ail backwoods Nihilists. O ne trouble is that children generally make unconvincing and boring vehicles for serious fiction, and one cannot here either believe that Louis is Tem pter or care that Geo is weak, then strong. T he adventures themselves aren’t really very memorable, nor is the setting in and around Vernal, Utah, sufficiently assertive and particularized to relieve the suspicion that this is a book about other books; so I’m afraid Geo and Louis will have no place on our shelves besides T om and Huck. There is a kind o f professionalism to the writing that gives the novel such plausibility as it possesses, marred however, by the use o f strident metaphor and language to shock us back to attention when our minds might otherwise wander, for exam ple, this description o f a man’s urinating outdoors on a cold night: “A blank hole opened in the snow — like an empty eye socket.” T he real heart o f things, however, is not boys’ adventures, but the fate o f the gloom y Light men, o f old Bill, intermediate Willie, and young Louis, an accursed race. T he curse seems to express itself much o f the time through the war o f the sexes, from the seasonally hermitic misogyny o f Bill (he lives apart from his wife in a tent every summer), through the uniquely unhappy marriage o f Willie (whom I found the best realized character), to an attitude in Louis that m ight be described as pubescent Don Juanism, only devoid o f Don Juan’s wit and grace. T hen there’s the philosophizing, likewise, I should insist, a part o f the curse. T he grandson embarrasses us with such aphorisms as, “T here is no point — not where people are concerned.” And his grandfather? More metaphysical. Some years earlier Bill Light had gone o ff with an Indian friend named B ent Tree, who was looking for his way to the sky, and who, having found it, left Bill behind exhausted and “just kept pulling away, kept getting smaller and smaller. Riding on up to timberline . . . And that’s the last I saw o f him . . . H e rode right on up into the sky.” Bill falls asleep and sleeps for two days, awakening only once or twice to see the sun, and disappointed to do so. Why? Because he hopes to see som ething else. What? “T he obvious.” And what is that? “T he thing nobody ever believes in, probaby don’t even believe in it when it com es along and catches them o ff guard.” Ah, he must mean death. So death is the obvious? “Yes.” Bill swirls his whiskey and drinks it neat. “Death and life.” T o that pair may I add another? Knowing som ething o f how to write and not having anything much to write about. THO M AS BAIRD, Trinity College Rolvaag: His life and Art. By Paul Reigstad. (Lincoln: University o f Nebraska Press, 1972. 160 pages, $8.50) Any listing o f im portant western writers would include the name o f Ole Rol­ vaag. And if one were naming a half dozen notable novels dealing with the American pioneering experience, he would have to count Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth. T hough many aficionados o f western literature have a high regard for Rolvaag, few have undertaken research about him or his work. More than 306 Western American Literature thirty years ago T heodore Jorgenson and Nora Solum published a useful biog­ raphy o f Rolvaag, but the volum e under review is the first full-length, published study o f his writing. Reigstad, who is Professor o f English at Pacific Lutheran University and who is well acquainted with the general trends o f Norwegian literature, first undertook this study as a doctoral dissertation at the University o f New Mexico in 1958. But his notes and bibliography indicate that he has exam ined research on Rolvaag appearing between the com pletion o f his...