Three Coyote Tales by Wayne Ude (review)

Reviews 369 That Constant Coyote: California Stories. By Gerald W. Haslam. (Reno: Uni­ versity of Nevada Press, 1990. 197 pages, $17.95/$10.95.) The generic post-Raymond Carver short story about working-class life always has that emblematic recitative of referents from strip mall culture: K-Marts; fast food chains; those ubiquitous green freeway exit ramp signs. Gerald Haslam writes about the working class of California’s Great Central Valley as if to show how it existed before or apart from this metastasis of mass culture. Well, that’s the territory staked out for Haslam by the claims on the bookjacket of That Constant Coyote: California Stories, his fifteenth book. Its twenty-five short stories are a veritable museum of Central Valley regional culture and geography. Okay, Haslam wears the mantle of Mark Twain’sfrontier humor in pieces like “The Great Waldorf Astoria Caper,” collected here. But mostly he main­ tains an air of respectful distance from his creations—old codgers and Okie roustabouts, African-American rodeo riders, a wise curandera, crazy and clinging Okie mothers, lowriders and good ol’ boys galore, to name some. But as I read on, danged if I didn’t start noticing the fissures in the nearly ethnographic purity of Haslam’s tone. That bungee-jumping New Age charla­ tan, the Divine Len Schwartz. A tone-deaf parody of feminist rhetoric. But what really put the whammy on the unreal beauty of Haslam’s distilled regionalism, though, were all those adult children of Okies—the ones who made it into the middle classes but keep coming home from San Francisco to contend with the rift between the then and the now. Sounds pretty post­ modern to me. Yep, Gerald Haslam has been bungee-jumping into postmodernism. Oh, it’s a slyboots postmodernism, to be sure. One of the grown-up Okies who comes home to the Valley gets the chance to rescue the bully who dogged his high school days. He watches the bully sinking into the quicksand of the raging Kern River. He lets the sucker die. So let’sjust say that in That Constant Coyote Haslam has found—eureka! —the formula for combining “postmodernism” with a face-full of frontier justice. It’s an ornery critter that has to be seen to be believed. JANIS HELBERT Pacific Palisades, California Three Coyote Tales. By Wayne Ude. (Petersham, MA: Lone Oak Press, 1990. $l,100.00/$535.00.) This first book from the Lone Oak Press of Petersham, Massachusetts, is an impressive debut. The Three Coyote Tales themselves are retellings of stories from Wayne Ude’sBecoming Coyote, a popular Small Press Book Club selection and one of the more successful presentations of this culture hero of Native American oral tradition. By “retellings,” I mean that the stories are 370 Western American Literature drawn from the bones of the earlier stories, but they wear as it were an entirely new skin. Ude’s prose style is firmly rooted in the oral tradition. He is direct, witty, and, above all, clear. The second tale, a wonderful account of the crea­ tion of men and women, is a feminist delight. Wayne Ude is a treasure. But a book like this one—consisting of a handbound, quarter-leather book, portfolio, and box by Barbara Blumenthal, hand-marbled paper by Faith Harrison, Abigail Rorer’s hand-colored etchings and wood engravings, and presswork by Darrell Hyder of Sun Hill Press including Granjon type letterpressed on Rives paper—is not exactly a book. It is a testimony to the Arts of the Book, it is an exquisite objet d’art. Ms. Rorer, an illustrator par excellence, has a substantial body of work from publishers like David Godine, Houghton Mifflin, and others, and has shown etchings, engravings, drawings, and water colors in galleries in Boston, New York, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. In the right hands, the limited edition book brings the work of artists of several kinds into a fully unified collaborative venture. When that collabora­ tion fails, it is usually the result of the printer’s ego: too much fancy footwork interfering with the reading of the text, poor choice of type, or paper too heavy or too delicate to function...