Blue Desert by Charles Bowden (review)

Reviews 259 models as natural speech and jazz music. Like French, but with a much dif­ ferent manner, Weinreich “posits” a “new grouping of core novels—a new Kerouac canon—based upon the literary repetition of the events of Kerouac’s life in his attempt to elevate the legend of his life to the level of myth.” Weinreich also continues to explore the split within Kerouac’s personality. Weinreich’s own prose begs analysis, e.g. “Through the creation of a superlinear motif, a quest of hyperbolic momentum and episodic frequency, Kerouac’s fascination with high-speed cross-country excursions brings quest romance into a distinctly twentieth-century mode.” Tautologies, simultaneous stases, christological, antithetical, quotidian images, rhetorical tropes, deindi­ viduated characters: not for freshmen! In his preface to Big Sur, Kerouac wrote that he saw the world through the keyhole of Jack Duluoz’s eye. Scholars are now eyeball to eyeball with Duluoz—in search of Kerouac and his genius. DAVE ENGEL Rudolph, Wisconsin Blue Desert. By Charles Bowden. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986. 179 pages, $16.95.) The necessary task of imagining the Sunbelt Southwest (particularly that denatured strip of Arizona below the Colorado Plateau) has never been a cleanly business. The desert exposes the ugliness of our disproportionate aims faster than any other landcape—witness how a clutter of relatively innocent mobile homes can deface a wide basin of creosote bush and paloverde. Perhaps the sheer difficulty, the near impossibility, of achieving some proportionate relation to this land absolves us, lets loose in purer irrelevance the kitschy, vicious, exciting energies of our drive to “develop.” To Charles Bowden’s credit, Blue Desert explores these energies and their deadly impact without in the least denying their bewitching power. Else what are we all doing here anyway? “I am in the boom and I try to catch the roar.” Bowden’s newspaper work in Tucson placed him well to turn a mod­ erately Gonzo journalism into lasting insight, revealing by participating. His editor tosses a police report down and says, “You’ll like this one, Captain Death.” And I go, I always go, and my entire being picks up and rises. I can sense this eclipse and I want to write it down. The Sunbelt has so much energy, so many slabs being poured, so much land being 260 Western American Literature slain, so much action and I know amidst this frenzy there are these eclipses when the sun goes black and the temperature drops, these little deaths of the blazing white light. And I do not want these moments to go unnoticed. Close to the roar, Bowden records (in one perfect glimpse of the capture of a rare desert antelope) the violation that goes with our compulsion to know and touch remnant wildness. He records the disappearance and persistence of people and cultures: Hispanic clans overrun by Tucson suburbia and local color, Papagos reviewing the ambiguous enticements of the real estate world, Ajo miners playing out the last rhythms of company life, lonesome personal histories surfacing in the momentary drama of crime. Over it all, the wash of boosterism and dream sensation; beneath it the accelerating death of species, with an occasional at least symbolic victory by Nature Conservancy or Earth First! The finest essays in Blue Desert may be the first and last. The opener is about bats, the “demons of our dreams” we have all but unconsciously sub­ jected to a “slow chemical death.” In the final chapter, Bowden follows the trail of illegal immigrants across more than forty miles of lethal dryness in the Cabeza Prieta and finds, as well as a writer can for a reader, “the only ground where I truly trust my senses.” As always with this kind of book, one may quibble with some of the ways in which personality enters the writing, but any flaws in that direction are inseparable from the honesty and courage of the imaginative task, and are part of the truth. Blue Desert is a work of excellence, and, just as an extra, one should mention that it is haunted by lions. DONN RAWLINGS Yavapai College Wild Mustangs. By Parley J. Paskett. (Logan: Utah State University...