Red Earth, White Earth by Will Weaver (review)

Reviews 225 and knowledge, as she tries to think like nineteenth-century Quincannon and to gain the confidence of Sofia Manuela, the surviving granddaughter of Don Esteban Velasquez who provides the final clues, brings to mind Tony Hillerman ’s Navajo tribal police-detectives, whose cross-cultural confrontations also make western mystery and murder exciting. CHARLOTTE S. McCLURE Georgia State University Red Earth, White Earth. By Will Weaver. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986. 383 pages, $17.95.) Red Earth, White Earth is a novel that raises an old problem of literary values: what is the relative worth of books that entertain as opposed to those that instruct? For this is an eminently readable work that holds the reader’s attention right up to the end. But it is not a book of substance; it’s as easy to forget as it is to read. That this is so is especially disappointing because Will Weaver’s first novel contains ingredients that could have resulted in a penetrating drama­ tization of some problems in the contemporary American W est: abuse of the environment, Native American land rights, and depressed farm economy, to name but a few. Guy Pehrsson, the protagonist, has left his family’s Minnesota farm for life on the West Coast, where he makes big money manufacturing (what else?) computer circuit boards. Returning home (in his Mercedes), he discovers violence about to erupt in a land-ownership dispute between Indians and whites. Because the instigator of the proceedings is an old childhood friend, a Chippewa lawyer, and because his family’s farm is threatened by the con­ flict, Guy is forced to come to terms with his own and his family’s values. The effectiveness of the plot is flawed by our inability to know Guy’s inner thoughts and feelings. Like so many post-Hemingway heroes, he repairs cars, fights, and makes love, all with the same monotonous imperturbability. If he has emotions, they are’rarely described, except for an occasional gratui­ tous passage: “He glanced briefly down her open shirt. He liked what he saw.” Moreover, the large number of incidents which fill the narrative are more often soap opera than great literature. Thus when Guy discovers his mother in bed with his old high school pal or when the three of them go skinnydipping together or when a major character dies uttering a fade-out one-liner: “Maybe I overdreamed,” one begins to question the purpose of the book. And, sure enough, comes the word from its publishers: Red Earth, White Earth is to be made into a mini-series for television. Need I say more? GEORGE F. DAY University of Northern Iowa ...