Beyond Manzanar: Views of Asian-American Womanhood by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, and: One Can Think About Life After the Fish Is In the Canoe by James D. Houston (review)

184 Western American Literature and Lie Down really “extraordinary”?), his outmoded contributions to “liter­ ary journalism,” his wrong-headed work on Nathaniel Hawthorne, his biog­ raphies of an ornithologist and a prizefighter, and his Sports Illustrated articles. Lewis thus has to slight much of his subject’s more purely western work. He does superbly analyze Cantwell’s important radical-protest novel The Land of Plenty (about a Northwest-coast strike) : the book is objectively narrated, without heroes, and with ideology reduced to symptoms in contrapuntally contrasted characters. But Lewis then skimps on Cantwell’s proud, sad western masterpiece The Hidden Northwest,mainly summarizing its treat­ ment of past explorers, erroneous myths about Oregon, pro-conservatist optimism, and pertinent travel literature. Walter Grünzweig’s academic, workmanlike monograph will help rescue mysterious Charles Sealsfield (a.k.a. Karl Postl) from neglect. It stresses the unique Austrian-American writer’s dual point of view, his seeming sympathy with American Indians but real espousal of the white man’s Manifest Destiny, the pervasive anti-Catholic bias of his fiction cast in the Southwest and Mexico, and his dramatizing of the dilemma of pioneers whose civilizing of the frontier outmodes them. Grünzweig compares his subject’s vast production (most of it first published in German) to that of other early nineteenthcentury writers. Especially fine is the critic’s discussion of the five novels comprising Sealsfield’s Lebensbilder aus der westlichen Hemisphäre. A stun­ ning insight by Grünzweig on his enigmatic subject: “Ironically, his view of America as a highly dynamic society was in itself static.” Our six critics, as well as WWS’s editors, deserve high praise for trying to come to brief terms with these six bewilderingly different creative western writers. ROBERT L. GALE University of Pittsburgh Beyond Manzanar: Views of Asian-American Womanhood. ByJeanne Wakatsuki Houston; and One Can Think About Life After the Fish Is In the Canoe. By James D. Houston. Capra Back-to-Back Series. (Santa Barbara, California: Capra Press, 1985. 65 pages and 65 pages respectively, $7.50.) Wife and husband Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston are two people who between them have published an uneven mix of selected fiction and essays which originally appeared between 1964 and 1983 in such popular publications as West Magazine, California Today, The Reader’sDigest [Japan edition), Holiday, Mother Jones, and several city newspapers. The readership which these publications connote fairly well explains the literary and intellectual level of this tandem production. (One half of the book is by one writer; turn the whole thing over, start again, and you get the other author’s contribution.) Reviews 185 Two separate and basic themes characterize the two authors’ respective interests: James Houston’s stories focus on a “sense of place” regarding his boyhood and adult experiences in Santa Cruz, California, whereas Jeanne’s interests lie in cross-cultural conflict and the ambivalence she feels about the tradition of her Japanese heritage. Her descriptions of how she handles this challenge, and how she balances her Japanese legacy with the need and desire for assimilation into the American cultural mainstream constitute the book’s most substantial assets. Jeanne illuminates the dehumanizing aspect of her World War II “relocation” experience, and she dramatizes the forced emigra­ tion from Japan to the United States of the Japanese “picture book” brides. Two chapters from an in-progress novel by Jeanne, “Chiba” and “Yokohama, 1906,” are clearly the most sensitive and original stories in the entire book. James Houston’scleanly written stories fail, as doesmost California litera­ ture of this kind, to transcend the region’s clichés: surfing, laidback and cool protagonists, specious observations, historical myopia and the at once sterile and suffocatingly fecund, bigger-than-life physical and cultural ambience of lotus land. JAMES W. BYRKIT Northern Arizona University The Uncle and Other Stories. By Joan Shaw. (Santa Barbara, Cadmus Edi­ tions, 1983. 101 pages, $6.00.) Joan Shaw writes the way Mary Steenburgen acts: with a fluttery, abstracted quality that somehow is not at odds with her underlying earthiness. In “The Uncle,” a novella that makes up the greater part of the Utah writer’s first book, Shaw uses a similarly...