Cold Wind River by Kent Nelson (review)

Reviews 339 Cold Wind River. By Kent Nelson. (New York: Dodd, Mead &Company, 1981. 233 pages, $8.95.) It has long been a critical commonplace to bewail how The Virginian, long ago, applied an apparently unshakable retrospective, nostalgic stance to western fiction. Although the geographical location of the fictional West has kept up with the course of American westward expansion, too often the temporal West has lagged behind in a world comfortably removed from contemporary events and their concomitant problems. Only fairly recently have novelists such as Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, and a few others taken more than tentative steps toward exploration of what is really the last fictional frontier — the contemporary West. To this intrepid band of literary adventurers the name of Kent Nelson must, on the basis of his first novel Cold Wind River, now be added. Many years ago Eugene Manlove Rhodes (who, by the way, would have a great deal of difficulty either in identifying or sympathizing with the West of Nelson’s novel) coined an evocative phrase for the cowboy: “the hired man on horseback.” It is with this hired man that Nelson’s novel deals. The first great irony in Cold Wind River is that this hired man is no longer a man on horseback. We are dealing with a very different world here: the contemporary Montana Nelson writes of is a world of feedlots, farm machinery, and absentee landlords who commute by private plane. Indeed, one of the cowhands’ineptitude at horsemanship precipitates the crisis which the remainder of the novel attempts to resolve when he is drowned while driving cattle across the Cold Wind River. The contest of wills between the ranch foreman Carl Murcer and various antagonists over whether and how a bridge should be built to avoid such incidents in the future is the thread on which the rest of the plot is strung. At first glance this seems a fragile enough thread, and so it isif one comes to the novel with the traditional expectations one brings to a “Western” — that finally its concern is simply with what happens next. Again Nelson is blazing an unfamiliar, if not entirely unknown, trail;for his primary fictional interests are not in what happens next, but in what has happened earlier. His real concerns are not the how of adventure story but the why of psycho­ logical fiction. His fictional vehicle for exploring these concerns is brilliantly chosen — a lonely Montana ranch locked in winter, where the inescapable fact of life is not romantic peril but simple boredom. Nelson has got to rank among the best writers anywhere at evoking the emotional effects of cabin fever. He is in the same league with Walter Van Tilburg Clark, whose explor­ ation of the same theme in The Track of the Cat is a yardstick to measure by. Yet again the differences are striking: Clark writes within the metaphor of the adventure story, where solitary riders pursue a mythical panther over a landscape of romantic peril; Nelson’s cowhands drink beer and watch TV in their bunkhouse while waiting for lumber to be delivered by flatbed truck. 340 Western American Literature Nelson’s tough-minded examination of life as it is in the West as it is will not suit the palates of those who prefer life as they wish it had been in the West that never was. Those with more adventurous tastes will find it heady stuff indeed. JAMES K. FOLSOM The University of Colorado, Boulder National Parks: The American Experience. By Alfred Runte. (Lincoln: Uni­ versity of Nebraska Press, 1979. xiv 4- 240 pages, $16.50.) There are ample ironies and intelligent insights even in Runte’s title, for the many conflicts over land use he discusses, coupled with several styles of popular historical consciousness, can certainly be defined as “the American experience.” The parks embody the myth that we are a “wondrous” people in a “wondrous” land (“scenic nationalism”), yet they also embody the cultural conflict between belief in “the sanctity of private property” and the conviction “that no individual had the right to own a national monument.” The tensions between these oppositions are further complicated by the shifts in...