Landmarks of Healing: A Study of by Susan Scarberry-Garcia (review)

158 Western American Literature a noteworthy introduction, an eight-page chronology of his life, and a com­ prehensive index complement the interviews to make this work a significant resource in studies of Carver, his fiction, and his poetry. Carver’sreceipt of the Mildred and Harry Strauss Livings fellowship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1983 perhaps crowned his writing career, giving him economic security for the first time in his life. In several interviews, Carver credits John Gardner, Richard Day, Gordon Lish, and Tess Gallagher (whom he married shortly before his death in 1988) for direction and nurture. But it was his own determination that enabled Carver to overcome a life of poverty, menial occupations, and debili­ tating alcoholism brought on by a teenage marriage and parenthood. Conver­ sations reflects Carver’s resilience and survival skills, qualities his fictional characters also possess. Carver’s beliefs about art as communication and writing as an act of discovery, a means of “bearing witness”; about the evolution from his early spare and dark fiction to his later rich and more affirmative stories; and about “stories as sparing as poems and poems that tell stories” are astute and selfrevealing . He believed the crises in his life enabled him to write about the “dispossessed” and the “things that matter, the things that move us.” His per­ sonal sufferings—struggle for an education, bankruptcy, divorce, alcoholism— made his life chaotic for a long time; but even with surgery for lung cancer and the reappearance of cancer in his brain Carver gave order to his creations and found joy in love and art: “I am happy ... I feel—I think I’m one of the luckiest men around.” Conversations also reveals pertinent quarrels Carver had with being labeled a minimalist and with deconstructive theorists; his attitudes toward teaching creative writing; the influence of other writers on his art: and the process of his own writing. The entire content, though sometimes repetitive as is ordinary in interviews, is surprisingly readable and informative. DELORES WASHBURN Hardin-Simmons University Landmarks ofHealing: A Study of House Made ofDawn. By Susan ScarberryGarcia . Forward by Andrew Wiget. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990. 208 pages, $24.50.) This is the second book-length study of the works of N. Scott Momaday to appear, and it differs markedly in approach from the first, Matthias Schubnell’s N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background (1985). Schubnell, believing that most prior critics had concentrated on Momaday’s Native American heritage in relation to his books, directed most of his attention to such literary sources as D. H. Lawrence, Isak Dinesen, William Faulkner, Reviews 159 James Joyce, and others (though he did include an excellent discussion of the oral tradition and its perpetuation through contemporary Indian writers like Momaday). Scarberry-Garcia, while appreciating the new insights Schubnell has offered, believes that he has not done justice to the “cultural” “back­ ground” indicated in his subtitle. Thus, her approach is exclusively ethno­ graphic in nature, and the signal achievement of her study is a far deeper penetration into the Navajo, Pueblo, and Kiowa sources and sub-texts of Momaday’s novel, House Made of Dawn, than we have seen before. Scarberry-Garcia demonstrates conclusively that the major ethnological source for the novel is the Stricken Twins variant of the Night Chant, and she is likewise persuasive in arguing (contrary to some previous critics) that the most important symbolic twin relationship in the novel is that between Abel and his older brother Vidal, not that between Abel and Ben Benally. While admitting that Benally’s role in the novel can partly be explained by twins symbolism (though in the older, not younger, brother role), she clearly sees Benally’sprimary function as symbolic night chanter or healer ofAbel’s aliena­ tion from his native landscape and the traditions that relate the individual self to it in a metaphysically correct and psychologically healthy manner. Scarberry-Garcia’smajor premise is that Native American healing occurs by a process of creating a new, spiritually correct relationship, through songs and prayers and ritual enactments, between the sick individual and features of the real physical landscape. Thus, “Belted...