In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviews 257 parole board, Yellow Calf is tabbed as the victim in an elaborate blackmail scheme concocted by inmateJack Harwood. Harwood’swife, PattiAnn, poses as a troubled client to gain leverage on Yellow Calf. But what begins as the first of many deceptions evolves into the first of many twists when Patti Ann and Yellow Calf tilt toward love. Consequently, the Indian lawyer finds himself threatened not only by criminal minds, but by his own desires and emotions as well. With the most complicated of Welch’s plots to date, the novel follows Yellow Calf through surprises and subtle ironies until all schemes unravel in a logical, mildly tragic, conclusion. The best of this very good book is its characterization. While Yellow Calfs history initially seems a little too good to be true, Welch soon proves that his protagonist is all too human. The supporting cast is even better. The characters Yellow Calf visits back in his little home town are wise and beautiful. And two truly bizarre ex-cons who haunt Yellow Calf and Patti Ann provide remarkable portraits of evil absurdity. While the book’s necessary overview of Montana politics is egregiously oversimplified (and this from characters who should know better), the views of prison life in Deer Lodge, and the contrasts between suburban Helena and reservation Browning are sharply detailed and insightful. At his best, Welch rises to lyrical description infused with psychological luminosity, as when The Indian Lawyer concludes. The last sentence is as rich and resonant as this reviewer has read in a long while. WILLIAM HOAGLAND Northwest Wyoming College Ride With Me, Mariah Montana. By Ivan Doig. (New York: Atheneum,1990. 324 pages, $18.95.) Those awaiting the conclusion of Doig’s Montana trilogy, (English Creek 1984, Dancing at theRascalFair 1987), will find Mariahworth the wait: a passion­ ate, funny, thoughtful novel, closing the previous two but standing on its own. Mariah takes place in 1989, its action framed by a four-monthjourney through Montana.Jick McCaskill, the young narrator ofEnglish Creek, is now sixty-four, a grief-chilled widower burdened by a ranch he can no longer run. His daughter, Mariah, photo-journalist, and her ex-husband, Riley Wright, columnist, have teamed up on a series about Montana’s Centennial, and Mariah persuades a reluctantJick to accompany them as driver/chaperone. The Montana they explore fulfills premonitions suggested in the first two novels: land exploited by mining and overgrazing, ranches taken overby distant corporations, wildlife disappearing, towns dying.Jick, too, suffers: The sites they visit raise painful memories and he feels responsible for this sad, denatured 258 WesternAmerican Literature place. He cannot face a future without his beloved wife. Furthermore, to his horror, Mariah and Riley, atfirst at odds in the aftermath of a bitter divorce, re­ discover their passion for each other. Within the frame of this picaresque novel, complicated by forays into history and memory, Doig explores major themes through complex and subtle narratives marked by duality ofvoice: the outwardly superficial and cynical Riley writes sharp, passionate columns, the outwardly laconic Jick is, inwardly, poet and philosopher. Through the play ofvoices, Doig explores issues of epistemology , tensions between past and present, conflicts between formal history and personal narrative, intricacies of memory, questions of responsibility. Finally Jick’s inner and outer voices merge, and he is able to make unconventional decisions about his daughter, his future, his land. In his 1964 essay, “History, Myth and the Western Writer,”Wallace Stegner lamented that no one had yet created a western Yoknapawpha county, traced historical continuities of the region. With This House of Sky and the Montana trilogy, Doig has done just that. But comparisons with Faulkner, or anybody else, must be made reservedly—Doig’s work is unique, and his voice ultimately realistic,joyous, life-affirming. ELIZABETH SIMPSON Gottingen, Germany The Light Possessed. By Alan Cheuse. (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, Peregrine Smith Books, 1990. 325 pages, $19.95.) The Light Possessed is a novel based on episodes from the life of Georgia O’Keeffe. Although the protagonist is called Ava Boldin, the events of her life and the names of some of the other characters (especially her husband, a professional photographer and...

pdf

Share