Fresh Meat/Warm Weather by Joyce Eliason (review)

346 Western American Literature The dialogue rings true and the action starts on page 1. If there is a moral it is that good is better than bad. And they evoke those times past, just as their poet laureate and honorary president, S. Omar Barker, does in writing: We hark in vain on the speeding train For an echo of hoofbeat thunder, And the yellow wheat is a winding sheet For cattle trails plowed under. DALE L. WALKER, University of Texas at El Paso Fresh Meat/Warm Weather. By Joyce Eliason. (New York: Harper and Row, 1974. 145 pages, $6.95.) When this slim novel first appeared in Utah, Ms. Eliason’s home state, it aroused a storm of controversy due to its scorching commentary on Mormonism. The book’s unnamed central character, an apostate Mormon attempting to free herself of religion’s yoke, not only condemns the church for repressing her individuality but also denounces it as an institution: “It’s a business. A con game.” (p. 76.) And because of this denunciation, few regional critics managed to get past that dimension to any real judgment of the novel as literature. Unfortunately, when weighed against any tradi­ tional literary standard, it does not fare too well, as it is but another in the growing list of “fashionable female-recognition” novels which began with Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. And while there may be, as John R. Milton wrote recently, “two or three obscene women who write well,” I must add Ms. Eliason’s name to those he mentions are not among them. Once past the obscene language, the obligatory, explicit sex scenes, and the other current best-seller ingredients, the reader is left with a lingering sense of superficiality in the author’s presentation of her nameless heroine’s conflict. Obviously, she is today’s Every(wo) man, caught between an imposed, invalid self-image and the discovery of her authentic self. Indeed, the reader is informed of that on several occasions through the heroine’s internal monologue. Even more disappointing is the fact that when the point of resolution arrives, it is couched in a time-worn cliché: “I see myself in my mind . . . as a tiny little slimmer of light at the end of a long dark tunnel.” (p. 106.) Lamentably, then, Fresh Meat/ Warm Weather is little more than a contrived “sanction” novel in which regional perspective is exploited to the pursuit of sensational interests and not to the largest ones, as Brewster Ghiselin has maintained it should. And that is unfortunate, for inherent in the Mormon materials Ms. Eliason uses are all the makings of a great novel. Reviews 347 What she chooses to present, whether from lack of talent or lack of concern, is a paper Mormon and a cardboard temple, and only enough for those who are able to believe in cardboard temples (as Vardis Fisher might say). ALAN CROOKS, Seattle, Washington The Manly-Hearted. Woman. By Frederick Manfred. (New York: New American Library, 1977 [paperback reprint]. 204 pages, $1.75.) This paperback reprint of Manfred’s latest “Indian book” makes the novel available for classroom use, and it will be a valuable complement to a course in American Indian literature as well as any other course that examines the literature of the American West. Harking back to the scene of Conquering Horse, The Manly-Hearted Woman is vastly different from the earlier book — brief and story-like where the early book is long, complex, and novelistic — yet Manfred’s themes remain the same: the exploration of human sexuality, the creation of new American myth grounded in the American land and spirit, affirmation of the complexity and validity of Yankton culture. The plot moves with the inexorable flow of Greek tragedy, though the story itself is unequivocally Indian (again unlike Conquering Horse with its tangle of Greek and Hebraic roots. Aside from a distant connection to the most rudimentary Christ-myth, the plot of The Manly-Hearted Woman is indigenous). From the beginning of the story we know that the hero will die, and the only question is what will his relationship to the heroine be? There are few writers who can...