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

282 WesternAmerican Literature Mountain West: How do young people from the region cope with growing up? What particular ‘rites of passage’ do they experience?” One answer lies in the special relationship between the characters and their “wild country.” The routine at a Montana high school is interrupted by a sniper’sbullets in Blew’s “The Snowies, The Judiths.”As students crouch fearfully beneath their desks, the protagonist understands that the mountain ranges which ring her town and once “offered haven”and “shelter”are merely impassive witnesses to the senseless violence. The notion that nature provides escape from the prob­ lems of a more hurried, complex life in town or city is continuously undercut, as in David Long’s “Great Blue,”in which a remote lake hides camping equipment lost on a fatal hunting accident long ago and becomes the place where a boy and his grandfather face squarely the fact of mortality. Everywhere, in these stories, the terrible beauty of the landscape is an austere witness to and a silent reminder of the fragile, transitory nature of all things human. Indeed, an eligiac mood pervades most of the stories. Many are set in autumn, when geese fly south and skies darken with impending snow. The bittersweet beauty of that season is commensurate with that sense of loss and griefwhich necessarily accompanies the birth of an adult consciousness out of the ashes of a child’s vision. The stories in Passages West present, in a variety of voices and styles, the knots of love and anger, fear and desire, shame and tenderness that resonate through all human relationships but have a special sharpness in the painful passage into adulthood. LLOYD BECKER Suffolk Community College Inroads:An Anthology CelebratingAlaska’s Twenty-SevenFellowship Writers. Edited by Elyse Guttenberg andJean Anderson. (Anchorage: Alaska State Council on the Arts, 1988. 210 pages, $12.95.) Since 1979 the Alaska State Council on the Arts has awarded fellowships in literature to writers throughout the state. Inroads is an anthology that gathers together the bestwork to be honored by this arts program, and includes poetry, drama, and prose. Some of the names will be well known to cognoscenti—John Haines, John Morgan, Richard Dauenhauer, Thomas Sexton, Ronald Spatz. Other names will probably be better known in the future—Jean Anderson and Linda Schandelmeier, to namejust two. Inroads, then, represents both the finer work of the “older”generation of Alaskan writers—those who have lived in the state since the 50s or 60s or early 70s—and the promising new work of the younger generation—those who began writing seriously in the late 70s and 80s. Alaska is so large an area geographically—a whole subcontinent encom­ Reviews 283 passing latitudes and longitudes—that, not surprisingly, many different schools and styles are found in this collection. InJohn Haines’essay “Mudding Up,”for example, we have the muted narrative voice and controlled prose of the older minimalist school, as Haines describes the early days of homesteading in the autumn of 1947. Members of the younger generation are working from a different continuum and with a different cultural dynamic, but are as deeply affected by the beauty and the power of the Alaskan landscape. This is particu­ larly evident in the poetry. John Morgan, for example, a poet living in Fairbanks, writes in “September” about his Harvard mentor Robert Lowell. John Morgan sees Lowell’s “big hands shaping space” and Lowell’s “index finger stirring an imaginary cup” in a writing workshop, and wonders “what/ would you make of thisjigsaw-puzzle picture/of time and place .. . ”Elsewhere, John Haines has asked “How long might it take a people living here . . . to produce . . . a literature of the first rank? Several hundred years? A few generations?” Inroads gives every indication that, in the comparatively short time since discovery and settlement, the literature ofAlaskahas already attained an impressive maturity. JOHN A. MURRAY University ofAlaska, Fairbanks FromInk Lake. Edited by Michael Ondaatje. (New York: Viking Press, 1990. 714 pages, $24.95.) Michael Ondaatje’s collection of Canadian short stories presents a compel­ ling view of another place. One is almost tempted to use the term “minimalism” for these pieces, although not in the sense the...

pdf

Share