A Novel Called Heritage by Margaret Mitchell Dukore (review)

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 round little island, like a kettle turned down,” “Shoalwater Bay pooled across nearly ten miles,” “the map begins to report a lingual stew.” His great skill with the vignette is also much in evidence: the escape from New Archangel, quick arrivals of death, fights among the Swedes in camp. Above all, there is a richness of historical reference and outdoors lore: the Russian indenture system; the guns used; the food available, how it was caught and preserved; the emptiness of the 19th-century ocean. So meticulous is the research, in fact, that history and geography become the true centers of interest in this novel. Readers should know that The Sea Runners isnot an adventure story in the way Deliverance or “The Open Boat” make themselves felt. Mr. Doig has gathered an interesting and varied set of escapees, and by focusing upon the mastermind of the escape, Melander, he sets the reader up for a large surprise. But characterization is subordinated throughout to a sense of the narrator’s firm grasp; for example, both the glib Melander and the inarticulate Wennberg have yarns taken from them in mid­ course to be piloted home by the dominant voice, which also gives frequent asides of historical perspective and folksy commentary: “By and large, a boat ride is a cold ride,” “Of all kinds of toil there are, the ocean demands the most strange,” “In time since, a poet has offered the thought. . . .” All of which is interesting, but which tends to emphasize the distance between us and the adventurers. Mr. Doig continues to hone his edge. There is much fine writing in The Sea Runners, and more than enough thought and action to keep any serious reader busy. KERRY AHEARN, Oregon State University A Novel Called Heritage. By Margaret Mitchell Dukore. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982. 276 pages, $12.95.) A Novel Called Heritage is a spoof of publishing etiquette, the travails of writing a semi-autobiographical first novel, and the various forms of literary narcissism that ensue when all of the above are a writer’s subject, as they are in this fast-paced comic novel. Dukore aims for a triple-play pun in her use Reviews 349 of the word “heritage” in the title. “Heritage” is the title of a novel-withinthe -novel. It also refers to a greenhorn novelist’s bewildering choice of role models and to the overriding problem of this novel’s main character, eighteenyear -old Anne Sarah Foster: how to survive if most of one’s relatives are certifiably crazy. Half the book is in the shape of that erstwhile favorite, the epistolary novel. Anne Sarah fires off letters to Martin Goldsmith, a middle-aged editor at the New York publishing house of Hastings, Hearte, & Daniels, warning that she will “say or do anything to get famous” and enclosing a sample chap­ ter of the book she is writing. Martin is baffled and intrigued by this impu­ dence, but he chuckles and keeps up his end of the correspondence (in more ways than one). Sandwiched among the letters that pass between the two are amusing snippets of Anne Sarah’s novel-in-progress, which she deals out to Martin chapter by chapter, as if he had the attention span of a soap opera addict. Anne Sarah and Martin’s...