Pat’s Whores by Barding Dahl, and: Looking Glass by Barbara Cherne (review)

Reviews 243 tions on Morris’s characteristic themes: evolutionary transformation; aliena­ tion, loss, and betrayal of affection; the puzzle of time. Although generaliza­ tions are risky, most of these stories comically explore how these themes involve accommodations to the social pressures exerted by “other people.” We encounter humans bewildered by the eccentric behavior of spouses and strangers, by social repressions accompanying old age, and by the obliviousness of the young. Morris frequently uses parallelism to reveal characters perceiving their human conditions. Colonel Huggins of “Fellow Creatures,” for example, dis­ covers solace in his similarity to animals, all victims of human aggression and human neglect. In “Victrola,” Bundy notes a moving correspondence between his old age and the death of his dog. In “Drrdla,” Walter, obsessed with “the emergence of life from darkness,” seduces a stray cat into rebirth, while his wife follows suit by seducing another man to her bed. And in one of the finest stories, “The Origin of Sadness,” Schuler, comparing himself to the fossils he finds in a Kansas gulch, attempts ironically to “slip time’s noose.” In addition to the intrinsic pleasures of the stories are the clues provided to the genesis of Morris’s preoccupations. The collection spans nearly the whole of Morris’s career, including fourteen previously uncollected stories; many of the stories initiate material developed with greater complexity in his novels. “A Safe Place,” for example, introduces the hapless Hyman Kopfman, later incorporated into the bizarre War Games and still later into Ceremony in Lone Tree. Similarly, the often anthologized “The Ram in the Thicket” expanded into Man and Boy, then more satisfactorily into The Deep Sleep. Several stories, like “Magic,” whimsically observe the inanities of group counterpoint so memorable in the novels. Finally, stories such as “Here is Einbaum” hint at technical parallels between Morris’s photographs and the images he crafts so carefully in prose. As always, Morris sketches closely observed pictures of the detritus of con­ temporary life, and he does so with subtle sympathy. JOSEPH J. WYDEVEN Bellevue College Pat’s Whores. ByBarding Dahl. (Santa Barbara: John Daniel, Publisher, 1986. 217 pages, $8.95.) Looking Glass. By Barbara Cheme. (Santa Barbara: John Daniel, Publisher, 1986. 181 pages, $8.95.) Two new books by Barding Dahl and Barbara Cheme explore the mean­ ing of the journey westward in the effect of place upon the changing con­ sciousness of the central character. In both Pat’s Whores and Looking Glass, place becomes the crucible through which the configurations of personality 244 Western American Literature are forged. For both Dahl and Cherne, the last frontier is the city of Los Angeles. For Cherne’s protagonist, it is the last remaining place where one can create oneself from scratch. For Dahl’s, the last frontier is the one place left “where nobody else wants to go.” Pat Fegan, Dahl’s protagonist, has come from Philadelphia to Los Angeles to try his hand at real estate. Ghetto real estate. “I don’t know anything about black tenants,” he admits as he closes the deal on his first ghetto apartment building. As his share of properties expands, Fegan gains not only wealth but a growing admiration for the tenants who occupy his buildings in their fierce determination to survive a life of poverty, fear, and humiliation. “Pat’s whores,” we learn, are Pat Fegan’s apartment buildings. The book charts the metamorphosis of the ghettos, as white businessmen flee the rising black tide of inhabitants, through its survival during the riots of the sixties, to the gradual transformation of black ghetto influence to Spanish dominance. For Pat Fegan, the ghetto is no wasteland, but the source of everything he still sees as vital—the source of life and the intoxicating possibility of death. It is clearly evident that Dahl has a compelling story to tell, and when the book follows this progression, it illuminates a whole arena of existence born of a critical point not only in the history of Los Angeles but America itself. Yet the book does not succeed as a work of fiction. At times it reads more like a first draft than final copy. The prose falls flat in numerous places...