The Uncle and Other Stories by Joan Shaw (review)

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 dissociated technique to suggest the psychic damage suffered by an incest victim. She reveals both the horror and the ordinariness in eleven year old Anna’s life at the ninon-curtained home of her aunt and uncle in Philadelphia on the eve of World War II. Anna’s uncle is still the scourge of her adult life as a Utah ranch wife in the contemporary present. Anna learns to face her past, but the story seems to dwindle off into nothingness, as if to say that the belated acquisition of insight and resistance can never compensate for a lifetime of lost possibilities. The final strength of “The Uncle” lies in Shaw’s ambiguous depiction of the bleak Utah landscape. She offhandedly makes it seem both chillingly neutral and redemptive. Shaw’s forte is writing about women confronting situations which victi mize them as women. Her feminist sensibility is understated, never polemical —but always there. And it’s frequently expressed with mordant wit. “The Victim,” another story in the collection, is a feminist thriller that reads like a treatment for the newly revived “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” television series. It deserves to be produced. “Victoria” is a bittersweet vignette of a 186 Western American Literature female college professor jolted into perception of the social meaning of her aging when she’s stood up by a student she tries to date. The stories in this book exemplify a trend in recent women’s literature noted by feminist critics such as Rachel Blau DuPlessis and others—a trend in which women writers try to “unwrite” the culturally prescribed “marriage/ suicide/madness” narrative solutions. Joan Shaw’s work would be of interest not only to these women’sstudies specialists, but to a wider audience as well. JANIS HELBERT Pacific Palisades, California The Deadly Swarm and Other Stories. By LaVerne Harrell Clark. (New York: Hermes Press, 1985. 136 pages, $5.00.) LaVerne Harrell Clark has the voice of a seasoned story-teller, an oral historian with a natural southwestern drawl. She pulls out each character’s valise and reveals the “old letters, cheap books and newspaper clippings inside,” building significance out of bits of tiny detail, flashes of fact and event mixed with memory. The language here is flavorful and satisfying, and the sense of vision is undeniable. Clark’s haunting photographs, which illustrate this book, hint at the nature of that vision. Descriptions seem to solidify out of the waters of some primordial darkroom: Down a lane of sand and wind and scrubby grass, this grey house stands, and several who grew there, while the chinaberry tree grew old, do live there still, and...