The Taste of Time by Ferol Egan (review)

324 Western American Literature The Taste of Time. By Ferol Egan. (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Com­ pany, 1977. 211 pages, $9.95.) The unlikely dates for the setting of Egan’s novel are, perhaps, the most conspicuous part of the book. On March 13, 1859, Jed Wright, a man approaching seventy, leaves the rain-soaked East to seek his fortune out West. But why is it 1859? — a time when the fur trade had long since deteriorated, the gold fields having given up what they had to give. And why a man of seventy moving West alone, whose own life has given up most of what it has to give? One feels throughout the novel that things are happening too late, that time has jerked the rug from under the plausibility of action, plot, setting. Nevertheless, there are appealing fictive possibilities in dealing with such unlikely times and people. Pulling the westward journey from its usual 1830-1846 sequence could infuse new blood into a slightly shopworn subject, but this Egan fails to do. Because the characters in the book are superficially conceived and generally not meaningfully developed, the novel loses what force may have been generated from the theme of age and aging, so that time here tastes of ambiguity, of stock figures acting in a tried but untrue formula. A big part of the novel is dialogue, and since the characters are Chinese, Indians, Mormons and country folk, dialects abound. The Mormons in the novel, for example, speak a stiff, austere language, filled with Quakerisms and references to Brother Brigham. Possibly Egan meant to use such dialect as a device of characterization, but the Mormons become mere caricatures. Jed Wright learns the lay of the land, and at times speculates about the land’s importance to the “spiritual” existence of Men, but his speculations are generally sketchy, as Egan does not capitalize on what could have been another dimension of the novel. Finally, the novel may be construed as a tolerable piece of adolescent literature, but certainly is not a notable addition to the literature of the West. RICHARD C. POULSEN Brigham Young University ...