On Us by Douglas Woolf (review)

Reviews 333 own negative abstractions,” an adulterous affair with her husband’s brother in Tasmania, and her own guilt over her convict rescuer’s (and lover’s) refusal to leave the bush after they have sighted the sheep station near Moreton Bay. Unlike the historical Mrs. Frazer, her child could only be stillborn and her breasts could only be dry, for she has too long attempted to balance the conflicting halves of her personality and to juggle her various roles as wife, nurse, adulteress, slave, and expectant mother. As she and Jack Chance flee “into the timeless frieze, of burning earth, and ghosts, and ghostlier living figures” that defines the Australian bush, Ellen Roxburgh realizes that she is a spiritual ghost as well as the physical ghost the aborigines tried to conceal under a covering of grease and feathers. One could question, as one reviewer has, the pedestrian nature of portions of the novel’s dialogue; yet that would be to overlook both the omniscient narrator’s at times ironic impreciseness and the fact that Austin and Ellen Roxburgh cannot communicate. One could also desire a shifting point of view that would reveal Jack Chance’s mind and fuse the distinctively Australian convict narrative with the captivity narrative; yet that would be to request a different novel. Although the novel could have been more compressed in the middle chapter, and although the Roxburgh brothers are too neatly divided into rational and passionate spheres, A Fringe of Leaves remains an engrossing work that dramatizes the conflict of Eros and Thanatos with sensitivity to language and character development. While Voss is perhaps more accessible as a novel of a comparative West, it is no more powerful than A Fringe of Leaves. STEPHEN TATUM, University of Utah On Us. By Douglas Woolf. (Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1977. 127 pages, $4.00 paperbound, $15.00 hardbound.) The first question to ask about Douglas Woolf is why so few readers know him; the second is why so few Western readers know him. For Woolf is, if the cliché can be pardoned, one of those excellent novelists who have never received their due. And Woolf is, now, very much a Westerner. There was a moment in the early sixties, after Fade Out was published by (¡rove, when he almost got a readership of some size. And when Ya! and John-Juan were (was, as these two novels are one book) put out by Harper & Row, a big, commercial press, in 1971, one might have hoped for him. But nothing much happened. Woolf has had his succes-d’estimes, but that larger audience has never found him. Why? Perhaps because he has seemed to some a kind of minor Kerouac. 334 Western American Literature Or somehow too experimental without having the easy sophistication of certain New Yorker writers. Or something— and all of them wrong. There are real reasons to object to Woolf’s work. I myself find him sometimes too obviously sentimental, too often a simple primitivist. And sometimes his little ironies ignore the major irony that all those establish­ ments and establishment types that Woolf holds up to mockery are abso­ lutely necessary for the kind of life that he (or his heroes) chooses to lead. Who stays at home and manages the world so that Woolf (his heroes) can travel? Who, even, works on that production line to build those cars? I, of course, am a member of an establishment, irrevocably bourgeois; I am, in short, one of his targets. Do I object because he attacks me? But I also read him, since, as I’ve remarked above, he is remarkably good. Born in New York, his work is mostly set in the West and could only be written by someone whose sense of the U.S. is Western. But he is no provincial. His work is, in texture, brilliantly imaginative, the true success of the surrealist vision applied to our American, Western, world. Too, his work is often very, very funny, with a humor that is intelligent, not mere broadness. It is also often touching, when it catches the nice distinction between emotion and sentiment. It is the brilliance of Woolf’s imagination...