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60 Western American Literature is controlled by the seven major oil corporations, and because the “great energy consortiums are looting the Southwest (and the Great Plains) under the red-white-and-blue banner of ‘energy independence’ for America.” But if the monster can be identified, he can be stopped. Recently, after many legal setbacks, Indian and non-Indian environmentalists prevented the U.S. Forest Service from turning a sacred mountain of the Karuk and Yurok people of Oregon into “Doctor Rock Recreation Area, Zone 7-11A Recreation Area, Primitive Experience.” Matthiessen realizes that the beast’s language radi­ ates his essence, and he has put him squarely in our sights. JULIAN C. RICE Florida Atlantic University California Writers. By Stoddard Martin. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. 224 pages, $20.00.) The subtitle, “Jack London John Steinbeck The Tough Guys,” is not intended to label London and Steinbeck. Dashiell Hammett, James N. Cain, and Raymond Chandler share (with references to Upton Sinclair and B. Traven) the longest chapter in the book. London and Steinbeck are treated in separate chapters; an “Introduction” and a concluding chapter, “The Sixties and After,” make up the remainder. We also find 17 pages of “Notes,” as the book has the look of a scholarly treatise. The Steinbeck chapter alone has 101 footnotes, the “Tough Guys” 91. A few are devoted to wide-ranging discussion, but most are either text references or references to standard, wellrecognized treatments of the subjects. This is reassuring, but it also serves as a warning not to expect special insights. The bookkeeping section of this review completed, what is the book about? I wish I knew, exactly. Every reviewer assumes, at least tacitly, that he can, as part of the classic paradigm, grasp the author’s full intentions. In the present case, I find the Introduction arbitrary and in several senses ambiguous, the three main chapters lacking in clear relationships, and the last chapter devoted to conclusions about issues which were treated at best as peripheral in the Introduction. In short. I find reader-orientation and guid­ ance ineffective. After a slap at “the common shortcomings” of “coffee-table books” (the example given — and, typically, footnoted - - is Literary San Francisco, reviewed in WA L for Fall 1982), Martin sets out to identify “the most unique [jzV] and representative” in California literature, restricting himself without explanation to novelists, and spurning “those either too early and obscure to have earned continued attention, or too recent to have settled into their proper place as major or minor voices.” His conclusion, after a rapid and largely unexplained process of elimination, is the flat statement that “Cali­ fornia to date has produced two great novelists, London and Steinbeck, and Reviews 61 one great school, that of the so-called ‘Tough Guys.’ ” “I have written three largely self-contained monographs. In each I treat the works and motifs of the figure(s) in question that seem most revealing of the California mind as a whole.” And later, “The overall progression this study deals with is from the immanent Eden where perfection seems given to the corrupt city where it can only be approached through smartness and untiring will.” The problem here is that Martin has selected both his subjects and his treatment to fit this “progression.” As those many readers of W AL who have waded through “grad-school papers” can testify, one can “prove” or “demon­ strate” almost anything by this method. The critical apparatus, the “judi­ cious” but elliptical, allusive, and highly colored style, and the arbitrary selections of Martin’s book will strike a familiar chord with such readers. The chapter on London traces the novels, stressing London’s social con­ science in his treatment of class conflict, the place of non-whites and women, and the alleged compromise of his principles near the end of his career. That on Steinbeck deals with his early radicalism, his presumed descent into an appeal to the middle class with Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row and the like, and the treatment of women in certain of the later works. The chapter on the “Tough Guys” shows similar emphases. The concluding chapter, which treats Kerouac and the...

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