The Popular and the Serious in Select Twentieth-Century American Novels by Patrick D. Morrow (review)

Reviews 179 To DeRose, the visual imagery and physical staging in Shepard’s drama provide the key to understanding the common ground between his theatrical and thematic images. DeRose sees as this common ground Shepard’s preoccu­ pation with heightened “states of consciousness manifesting themselves in a perception of the self and the world as unfixed.” In this unfixed world, Shepard’s heroes reject and rediscover their homes, heritage, and heroism. Although DeRose follows up his thesis with a fine and careful reading of the plays, his study falls short on two counts. First, the author inadvertently under­ cuts one of his selling points in stating that Shepard’s unpublished plays “have earned the obscurity to which they have been relegated.”Accordingly sketchy is his treatment of these works. Second, DeRose overlooks that the very West which he chooses not to explore provides the common ground that he seeks. In The Tooth of Crime, True West, and other works, the characters strive for states of consciousness combin­ ing realism and surrealism, intellect and the emotions. Crow in The Tooth of Crime goes beyond a “surface of floating images,” while Hoss transcends “the presence of something real behind the style.” In the end, the Gypsy Crow symbolically reconnects with the land in taking over Hoss’s turf, while Hoss puts his gun in his mouth and dies in true style. Hoss and Crow, like the other warring characters in Shepard’s drama, can only trade places because they feel at home as much on the old western frontier as on the new western freeway. Their West is one of continual change, where myth and reality co-exist, as they do in the final stage image of True West. The odd brothers square off to each other in their mother’s suburban kitchen, but at the same time they are caught in a “vast desert-like landscape at high noon.” It is true that Shepard’s holistic view of the West corresponds to the holistic view of the self that DeRose concerns himself with in an expert and readable manner. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort can be said for Martin Tucker’s book. There is no new thesis and no discussion of Shepard’s latest work in Tucker’s text “because of the limitations of deadline.”If there is a thesis, then it must be “that Shepard’swork is the truest source for discovery of his humanistic view of worldly ironies and for his sense of apprehension of the roles that his literal family and the family of man have played in his life.” Austin in True West would have said: “Now that’s a true story. True to life.” RrCfDOLF ERBEN Stuttgart, Germany fKe Popular and the Serious in Select Twentieth-Century American Novels. By Patrick D. Morrow. (Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. 153 pages, $59.95.) Anyone looking for an introduction to the study of American formula literature, particularly those with backgrounds in the classical American literary 180 'Western American Literature canon, could do worse than to start with Patrick Morrow’s The Popular and the Serious. The book defines two parallel literary traditions which Morrow calls, except in his title, the formula and the complex, rather than the popular and the serious. Although he recognizes them as discrete traditions, Morrow is interested in some of the points at which they intersect during the twentieth century. In some novels, like The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises, the success story of formula literature is stood on its head: success brings misery, not happiness. He then gives comparative examples of the treatm ent of two themes—mental retardation and the immigrant—within each tradition. Fi­ nally, he shows how the two traditions are somewhat blended in the gentle parodies of Richard Brautigan. The strengths of the book are, in the first place, Morrow’s clear definition of formula literature and his differentiation of the two traditions, though most of it, as he admits, is little more than a restatement of the ideas ofJohn Cawelti. The chapters on the themes of mental retardation and the immigrant are also strong, in their close comparison of the two traditions. Less successful...