Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner by Wallace Stegner (review)

Reviews 149 never given up his causes, from a Mexican prison. Those who make it out alive briefly, if not cleanly, confront the promise they once imagined for their lives. In the title novella, Clare, a middle-aged intellectual, faces the harshest of personal truths, understanding fully that the last person on earth who could be her best friend is her husband. She buries herself in the mud of an Iowa cornfield for a spiritual journey deep into the past and herself before emerging into a world lit by fireflies intent on salvagingwhat remains of her life. Harrison is excellent here: the husband is not a villain. He is a man in America in the last gasp of the twentieth century. He has accepted the flow of capitalism without question and has ceased to be the human he once was. Although his perceptions are shallow, he is not without heart. But ordinariness will not sustain Clare. Reversing manifest destiny, Clare goes east to the Paris of her youth. Americans, it seems, can no longer imagine a West to grow to. These stories work toward resolution in human terms. We are not left with isolates contemplating their next move in a universe of infinite possibility. Life, Harrison seems to be saying, has to be lived here and now, an admonition perhaps too dangerous to take seriously. DEXTER WESTRUM Ottawa University Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner. By Wallace Stegner. (New York: Ran­ dom House, 1990. 525 pages, $21.95.) In his introduction to this superb gathering of stories, Stegner remarks that his settings reflect his “tyrannous sense of place.” To readers of his novels and non-fiction, many of the places and Stegner’s power to evoke them are alike familiar. Going back as early as 1938, various stories take us to the California coast, to western Canada, to New England, to Utah or elsewhere, and pull us just as compellingly into their historic niches and the lives of their people. As in Stegner’s novels, the sense of the past is always present, our own past, that of the characters, of humanity. In “The Women on the Wall,” an introspective California scholar watches a group of World War II service wives wait daily for mail from their men, imagining them some balanced reincarnation of Homeric heroines, until he hears and sees them too clearly to impose his smooth, academic patterns on their rough realities. This almost photographic sense of contrast marks many of the stories: contrast between what is and what might be or has been, or between conflict­ ing value systems. In “The Butcher Bird,” one finds a powerful disillusionment with the harshness of the West and certain western types, here represented by the insensitive father who scorns his English neighbor’s gently accented talk, his love of music, his yearning to make trees grow in a barren land, and who 150 Western American Literature feels threatened by his son’s and wife’s response to the neighbor’s gentle ways. The story’s surprise ending is deeply satisfying. In a sentence like a gunshot, the wife who has endured too much too long equates her husband with the shrike, the “butcher bird” which destroys life for its own cruel amusement. These stories are not necessarily the best two—choosing the best among such beautiful bits of short fiction would be next to impossible. My recom­ mendation is to buy the book and savor them all slowly, as one savors “The Sweetness of the Twisted Apples,” another title from this splendid collection. JANE HELM MADDOCK Western Montana College of the University ofMontana Western Ghosts. Edited by Frank D. McSherry, Jr., Charles G. Waugh, and Martin H. Greenberg. (Nashville, Tennessee: Rutledge Hill Press, 1990. 215 pages, $9.95.) A reprint collection of thirteen short stories, Western Ghosts provides fairto -decent return for its reasonable cover price. Good ghost stories, one might argue, are based in the concrete detail of the everyday world. In this particular situation, the American West proves that world. Harlan Ellison’s “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes” is a high-energy Las Vegas yarn about a haunted slot machine. Irresistable to men while alive, a dead Maggie Moneyeyes retains old...