Chasing Uncle Charley by Cruce Stark (review)

184 Western American Literature old life was passing away in the Southwest, and make us feel that the issue is not merely of the region, or of the past. KERRYAHEARN Oregon State University Phasing Uncle Charley. By Cruce Stark. (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1992. 369 pages, $17.95.) Cruce Stark’s first novel is set in Texas in the post-Civil War period and it uses events and figures from the old West at the center of many of its episodes, but the reader should check any expectations of consistent realism at the door. The novel is a clever melange of literary types, most centrally picaresque and allegory. It is fast paced, funny, and engaging. The structure is episodic. After a startling and amusing opening sequence, young Bo Johnson finds himself volunteering to leave his secure East Texas home to search for his runaway Uncle Charley. Bo is essentially an American Candide. Naive and mostly passive, he requires a series of guides to lead him toward his elusive and increasingly mysterious Uncle Charley. These guides (from preacher to prostitute, Texas Ranger to Mexican bandit, Big Thicket recluse to Indian cowboy) appear magically at the moment of need. Their voices accumulate in Bo’s head as he progresses toward his goal; indeed Bo’s journey proves to be at least as much an interior as an exterior one. The most striking and entertaining feature of the novel is the technique, related to black humorist tradition, of exploding scenes of comfort or security with sudden and sometimes macabre violence. Stark makes another interesting choice when he opens the novel with a first-person communal voice reporting the events that set Bo’s quest in motion. As Bo then leaves town, the voice acknowledges that it will write henceforth from supposition, and then carries on as a limited-omniscience narrator perched on Bo’s shoulder. This opening does establish a folklore tonality, but perhaps the more significant effect is to remind all of us homebody Telemachus types that we inevitably approach the terrain of Ulysses only through hints and guesses. Similarly, the central point of the novel is to contrast the human sense of a home place with the human longing for freedom, and to unfold in one Ameri­ can Everyman the pulls of these two elements during the last historical period to feature this psychological duality so acutely—the American West in the dynamic rush of the later nineteenth century. On the whole, this first novel is quite entertaining though not up to the hum orous impact of Shrake’s Blessed McGill or the compelling scope of McMurtry’s LonesomeDove. Still, readers who enjoyed those two western winners will find Chasing Uncle Charley a satisfying read. RICHARD MOSELEY West Texas State University ...