Giovanni’s Gift by Bradford Morrow (review)

416 Western American Literature Giovanni’ s Gift. By Bradford Morrow. (New York: Viking, 1997. 325 pages, $24.95.) Bradford Morrow’s 1995 novel, Trinity Fields, concerns two men whose adolescence in Los Alamos was tainted by their anger about their fathers’ roles in the Manhattan Project. Like the shock waves from Alamogordo, their anger moves outward into the world: the narrator’s moves to the Columbia University student protests, and his closest friend’s extends to sorties over Vietnam and Cambodia. Morrow m oves the American West outside itself, connecting it with contemporary history. The characters, in fact, barely exist except as representa­ tions of conflicts. Morrow’s new novel, Giovanni’ s Gift, begins and ends in Rome, and is sim ­ ilarly interested in avoiding the tag of regionalism— its first-person narrator advertises his erudition, and his aunt and uncle are professional-class sophisti­ cates returned to Ash Creek, somewhere in the Rockies, after successful careers and world travels. It com es as something of a surprise early on that such people fire rifles at a night visitor who harasses them by blaring Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung through loudspeakers, but those who recognize the conventions of the multi-plot television program w ill soon locate the interweaving of a love story, a murder-mystery, and a land-grab conspiracy attended by environmental themes. Marketing is frequently a visible issue. Morrow’s purposes surpass television’s, however, as the plots merge to make an initiation story for the thirty-three-year-old quester who must, ironically, return to the place of his childhood in order to have a chance at growing up. It is never clear how reliable the narrator is— he takes very large liberties in con­ structing scenes he did not witness and internal lives for other characters— or how coy the relationship is between the man who narrates and the man who acts. But the theme of the latter’s growing understanding holds the disparate parts of the story together, and just before a climactic moonlit pursuit through the forest, he perceives the West as metonymy: “for all its isolation and insignificance, this val­ ley was host to the depravity of human history.” He must demonstrate for him self whether, as Sir Thomas More proposed, the times are never so bad but that a good man can live in them. K e r r y A h e a r n O r e g o n S ta te Un iv e r s it y Hunter’ s Trap. By C. W. Smith (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1996. 216 pages, $22.50.) C. W. Smith, a professor of English at Southern Methodist University, has previously “electrified” his reading public with such novels as Thin Men of Haddam, Country Music, The Vestal Virgin Room, and Buffalo Nickel. Now this ...