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Reviews 277 The best story is “Horse Medicine,” although “Groceries” received the P.E.N. Syndicated Fiction Award. “Horse Medicine”is narrated by a 16-year-old Navajo named Ryderwho accompanies relatives to Indian rodeos, probably run by white men. His voice is illiterate but he captures one’s attention. Our sympathy is with Taffy and Flag, the two roping horses. “Winnings” continues Ryder’s rodeo story with the author’s emphasis upon the white man’s duplicity in dealing with Native Americans. One would do well to be aware of the silent Indian! “Groceries”has a retired Navajo named Walter as the narrator. Regarded by his relatives as “no good,”Walter has pride and endures. He is a silent Indian. The sea stories “Shaft Alley”and “From Panama City to Colón”concern a narrator named Tom who is a wipe on a military transport ship carrying B-52 bombs to Vietnam. Corrupt and whoring seamen predominate in the stories. Beneath the camaradería of the seamen is the author’s criticism of the government’s policy of shipping munitions to these countries. To the author’s credit, he certainly knows his watery geography! The other stories rely upon characters who encounter problems they cannot always solve. The narrator of “Dirt”visits a vacantlot in the citywhere his grandfather’s store once stood and relives his past. “Syzygy” is puzzling. We know that Catalpa has been here before. There are lots of motels similar to those the young couple visit in “The Dead Dog Motel.”‘The Cyclone Racer”is set in an amusement park where the Mexican characters go on a roller coaster ride. What happens to Tío Salvador? Note the voice changes, done so well in this story. Zepeda is a talented writer and with this first collection he presents a grim picture of the lives of his characters. Recipient of a 1989 California Artists’ Council Fellowship, he is a writer to watch. DORYS CROW GROVER East Texas State University Homesick: New & Selected Stories. By Lucia Berlin. (Santa Rosa, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1990. 284 pages, $25.00/$13.00.) The short stories in Lucia Berlin’s new collection, Homesick, have a distinctly western air about them. Berlin takes us from the mining towns of the West, to the Southwest, Mexico, Chile, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her narratives dwell evocatively on these places, calling them forth more by attention to the people who inhabit them than by landscape description. Berlin moves fluidly among various ethnic and socio-economic groups; her ear for dialects and sense of local customs effectively capture the diversity of the West. Read collectively, most of these stories follow a single character from her unhappy childhood, through her failed marriages, her alcoholism, and her life 278 WesternAmerican Literature as the single mother of four sons. While this sounds depressing in outline, the main character holds our interest. Her resilience, resourcefulness, and occa­ sional ferocity force us past the ambivalence her essential passivity might other­ wise have inspired in us. And because Berlin offers only tacit or oblique connections between stories, we become involved in piecing together the life story of this central character. The link, as in so much recent western fiction, is the character’s search for roots, her need to establish home and family, to secure a sense of permanence and tradition. Many stories linger on her at­ tempts to physically constitute place through cleaning, painting, planting— homemaking. Her efforts, though, are always undermined by the imperma­ nence of personal relationships, the failure of the modern family. Most of the stories in this collection are reprinted from Berlin’s earlier volumes. Among the new stories are several of her best, including “Lead Street, Albuquerque,” “The Adobe House with a Tin Roof,” and “La Barca de la Ilusión.” Not all the selections included, however, serve the collection well. While the bulk of the stories relate more or less directly to a single persona, several do not, and these randomly interrupt what otherwise feels like an ongoing narrative. A few stories, such as “Rainy Day”and “The Maiden,”read like workshop exercises and these also detract from the strength of the...

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