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Reviews 245 achieves an admirable mix of sympathy and criticism without bitterness. Cherne neither condemns nor absolves him, yet provides a solitary moment of grace at the very end, when Larrson meets Nicole once again, now married to the father of the child soon to be born. As she permits him to touch her swollen belly, he feels for an instant, “a tiny foot, or perhaps an elbow, moving serenely across the arc of her womb,” and recognizes at last the “precarious­ ness of life, and the cruel paradox of [our] attachments and [our] vulnerabili­ ties,” realities which transcend even the poet’s desire to possess them through art. In this story of the seduction of place and the usurpation of reality by the poetic sensibility, Barbara Cherne has written a fine first book. ANN PUTNAM University of Puget Sound Western Stories. Edited by Peter Bischoff and PeterNocon. (Germany: Ferdi­ nand Schoningh at Paderborn, 1984. 145 pages.) Editors Bischoff and Nocon have assembled a series of stories written in the western romantic tradition for use in German universities as an introduc­ tion to the study of the short story form, the romantic portrayal of the Ameri­ can West, mass fiction, or certain aspects of American English. The editors have excluded the broader range of western fiction, emphasizing that the stories gathered here represent, “the Western as a romantic and mythical reappraisal of American Expansionism in the 19th century and the Western as the prototype of popular literature.” The stories range from Dorothy M. Johnson’s, “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (made into a movie), to formula Westerns such as John Cunningham’s “The Tin Star,” to Judith Rascoe’s recent satire, “A Lot of Cowboys.” The notes and extensive footnotes on western language usage make one realize that the lingua franca of the West derives from a rich tradition. The editors trace the ancestry of words like canyon, arroyo, reboza, and mesquite. They define peculiarly western terms like bat-wing doors, flapjack, boothill, and dead beat, and they explain the convoluted use of grammar and tenses in expressions such as, “Who was they?”, “It wouldn’t do no harm,” and “Whadda I gotta do?” Increasing thework’svalue at the university level is the separateTeacher’s Book which provides a story analysis and considerable discussion of each story’s parts, including time, place, idea, plot, theme, and message. Given the parameters that the editors have set up for themselves, I con­ sider this a very successful little publication. German students should have a 246 Western American Literature great deal of fun with it. The only gray area which comes to mind is the edi­ tors’sdistinction between the “Western” as formula fiction and the “Western” as “quality fiction” composed by writers such as Edward Abbey or Larry McMurtry, who “point out the boredom and loneliness of life in contemporary western cowtowns, or express their concern about the ecological violation of western flora and fauna and landscape.” I cannot find a place here for the stories of Charlie Russell, Will James, or Eugene Manlove Rhodes, all rep­ resenting the “real” West and beloved by cowboys and other westerners yet today. FLORENCE BLANCHARD Blaine County Community Education/ College of Southern Idaho Collected Essays and Short Stories. By H. L. Davis. (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1986. 366 pages, $10.95.) The West H. L. Davis knew and wrote about had vanished (or mostly vanished) years before he completed the work collected here. In writers less skilled or softer around the edges, that disparity might well have resulted in too much Of the sloppily sentimental. But with H. L. Davis, that’s not the case. His sentences are spare, tightly constructed; they’re every bit as good as the best Hemingway. And Davis’ central characters possess a rock-solid sense of themselves—their weaknesses as well as their strengths—which blunts any drift towards rosy nostalgia. Davis typically sets his stories in the open, often arid country of the Columbia Basin. His essays range somewhat wider, from Puget Sound to Southern Oregon. Both stories and essays draw on that time of tremendous cultural transition, roughly the first quarter of this century, which saw...

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