Entering A Life by Ernesto Trejo, and: Who Will Know Us? by Gary Soto (review)

Reviews 365 ings ever done on detective novels. Elsewhere Schopen offers more condensed assessments of the twenty-three individual novels (seventeen devoted to Lew Archer) and overviews of the “periods” in Macdonald’s long career. Thus Schopen highlights both the major accomplishments and the essential curva­ ture of Macdonald’s career. The major strength of this extremely well-written study is its individual assessments, especially those worked out in meticulous detail. My reservations are details of another kind. Schopen often compares Macdonald’s works to Raymond Chandler’s, almost always to Macdonald’s advantage, and I think that a more sustained discussion of Chandler would have made this comparison more effective. Occasionally, too, the brevity with which some novels are treated renders the discussion all too general. Such minor irritations detract very little from the excellence of this study, however, an excellence to be seen in everything from the annotated bibliography to specific comments such as the following on Lew Archer: “He would love, but finally his will to love is not as strong as the ‘cruelty in my will to justice.’ Thus the absence of a real per­ sonal life. Thus the emotional intensity of his professional life” (68). Thus the unusual authority of Schopen’s book, which should be read by anyone inter­ ested in Macdonald or detective fiction. ROBERT MERRILL University of Nevada, Reno Entering A Life. By Ernesto Trejo. (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1990. 78 pages, $8.95.) Who Will Know Us? By Gary Soto. (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1990. 69 pages, $8.95.) New books by Ernesto Trejo and Gary Soto give us the kind of poetry we hope for—a poetry of great craft and conscience. Both address their Chicano experience growing up and living in California, and both write skillfully and inventively about their experiences. But they take off from there to ask aesthetic questions as well as questions that investigate our humanity and take up meta­ physical speculation. Entering A IJfe is Trejo’s first full-length collection in English; he has, however, been publishing poems and chapbooks in English since 1973, and has published a book and chapbooks in Spanish as well as a translation of Jaime Sabines’selected poems, Tarumba, with Philip Levine. It is not overstating the case to say that Entering A Life, although a first book, is a truly mature and accomplished collection. Trejo combines surreal imagery with a lyric and narrative voice. He gives great range and importance to the imagination, gives it equal weight with “facts” when interpreting experience. The poem “This Is What Happened” 366 Western American Literature allows the imagination to re-write the first section in which the speaker tells of his car crashing to avoid an animal in the road. The second section is more magical, sinister, weighty. . . . There were no animals. There was only me on the shoulder of the road. My body a still river, my head on a lagoon. You thought you saw a swallow, a black swallow and still you didn’t lose control. The mountain to your left collapsed and I leaped on you, where I have been ever since, lodged somewhere between your neck and your shoulder. Many poems also demonstrate a great skill with autobiographical mater­ ial, yet Trejo resists the straightforward narrative method; the title poem demonstrates the many takes on experience that Trejo’s imagination brings to the everyday. The speaker makes up stories about his Uncle Felix who left the family;he enters his uncle’s life with poignancy and greatdetail—imagines him alone running a motel in Missouri, doing time in ElPaso for smuggling workers, or prospering as the owner of a jewelry store. Finally, he wants an honorable memory for his uncle and an honorable and peaceful life for him­ self;he concludes: you felt belittled & didn’t care & changed your name & invented a past to tell your daughters just as I am inventing your life now because I no longer want to hear stories or obituaries about you. I don’t want you to be a ghost disturbing the lives that had nothing to do with yours, even if at one time they called you brother, son. Gary Soto...