The Sea Runners by Ivan Doig (review)

Reviews 347 not necessarily prepared to read The Grapes of Wrath” (p. 1) Davis points the way for readers “to retrieve the sensibility” for reading well a novel which “though recently a work of contemporary fiction — stands now, ve must recall, in the middle distance of American literary history” (pp. 1-2) since it runs counter to the main development in recent literature — modernist fiction. Appropriately, many of the pieces in Davis’volume deal with the novel’s structure. Davis does not include any of those early articles (for example, by Joseph Warren Beach, Malcolm Cowley, Edmund Wilson or Joseph Henry Jackson) which view The Grapes of Wrath primarily as a social document. And perhaps this is why Benson’s recent work is also excluded. Instead, the essays in the book focus on issues dealing with such matters as narrative voice, the interweaving of microcosm and macrocosm (the Joad story and the inter­ chapters) and with the novel as a development of epic, biblical and mythic traditions in American literature. This is not to say that Davis wants to convince us that The Grapes of Wrath is a modernist novel. Rather, we find that the book is, as Edwin Bowden tells us in “The Commonplace and The Grotesque,” still clearly in the tradition of the “American concern in fiction for the problem of isolation.” (p. 22) And we see that Steinbeck’s solution to this problem — the loss of self in concern for others, the idea of “group-man” embodied in the Joad’s realization that self-fulfillment comes through commitment to the community of all men and women (what Warren French calls “the education of the heart”) is simply a modern version of our continuing romantic tradition in fiction. One comes away from Davis’ volume affirming or reaffirming that The Grapes of Wrath is, both structurally and thematically, a complex, masterfully written novel that we are only slowly learning to read well. Perhaps this is because it appears to offer few critical problems. Its form is not innovative by modern standards, and it does not demand great scholarly erudition of its readers. More importantly, it forces us “to feel” — something which in our current adoration for method and technique we are losing the ability to do. The central values in Steinbeck’s novel are emotional, not cerebral. And, The Grapes of Wrath is not at all a period piece about a troubled time long past, but a novel which, as Peter Lisca so accurately notes, we can continue to read with “a sense of emotional involvement and aesthetic discovery.” (p. 48) RICHARD ASTRO, Northeastern University The Sea Runners. By Ivan Doig (New York: Atheneum, 1982. 279 pages, $13.95.) In Mr. Doig’s second book, Winter Brothers, his spiritual ancestor James Gilchrist Swan reached his most glorious moment at an age when most men are content to sit by a golden pond: he explored by canoe the uncharted western coast of Graham Island in the Queen Charlottes, and became for Mr. Doig an archetype, the “western venturer . .. the history-bearer.” A jour­ ney in many ways like that one is the subject of this first Doig novel, and the meticulous research, the attention to rendering minute and faithful “reality,” and the author’s excitement for the quest found in Winter Brothers are here 348 Western American Literature as well. With his third ambitious book in six years, Mr. Doig has established himself as one of the leading interpreters of western experience. He deserves success. The Sea Runners, a fictionalized account of four Scandinavians who escape servitude in New Archangel (Sitka) by the absurdly bold plot of steal­ ing a canoe and heading south in mid-winter for Astoria, a journey of 1200 miles, has many strengths. Mr. Doig’s skill with geographical and natural description is given full play, for this is not an excursion down the Inside Passage, but a skirting of windward shores and dashes across Christian Sound, Dixon Entrance, and Hecate Strait, always with the threat of storms, contact with unfriendly tribes, and the twice-daily passage through Pacific surf. Those who have enjoyed Mr. Doig’s energetic prose will be rewarded once again: “A high...