One Degree West: Reflections of a Plainsdaughter by Julene Bair (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 2 7 3 In this very personal book, Williams takes on the heavy mantle of “artist,” as well she should. In the process, she divests herselfofconventionality: she and her husband bum their marriage certificate; she quits her secure job; she moves from the city; she spends days alone in the Prado with her lover, Bosch. Williams also discards on occasion conventional prose, as in this meditation on Hell: “The stakes are high. High on the ridge. Pull the stakes. One by one by one. Count your many blessings see what God has done. Take the wooden stakes out of the Earth into our hands one vertical the other horizontal tie them together with orange plastic tape turn them into crosses plant them in the soil see how rage grows see how rage flies dragonflies be calm they say sit at the table they say come into consensus they say with the power vested in them they say oh say can you see my body a clear-cut my voice a serpent wrapped around the tree the power vested in me like afire is burning" (126). While some of her ver­ bal leaps were effective, others seemed like contrived mysticism, mere shadows of Toni Morrison or the magical realists. But the risk Williams took in slough­ ing her trademark lyricism on behalf of her vision epitomizes Leap. Is this book memoir? The term is too passive for Leap and for what Williams is attempting: a passionate portrait of the evolving artist-in-motion, a woman committed to healing the rift between our cultural hedonism and its hellish results. Williams is not remembering; she is boldly leaping forward from comfortable prose so that we are discomforted by her vision. One Degree West: Reflections of a Plainsdaughter. By Julene Bair. Minneapolis: Mid-List Press, 2000. 182 pages, $16.00. Reviewed by Susan Naram ore Maher University of Nebraska, Omaha The latter half of the twentieth century ushered in enormous social and cultural changes in the American West: the rise of corporate farming, divorce rates, education levels, and environmentalism; the migration to the urban West; the redefining of family structures; and the challenge to tradi­ tional gender alignments. In her intimate portrait of one family’s adjustment to post-World War II America, Julene Bair connects family history to larger history. One Degree West bears witness to the aftermath of a half-century’s upheaval. With careful eloquence, Bair traces the fault lines within her family, divisions deepened by gender, colliding dreams, and death. Framing all is the intractable reality of western Kansas. Memoir writing in the last decade has emerged as a significant genre in American letters. Bair posits that the “unquenchable thirst for the untram­ meled and real drives the current interest in place-centered memoirs” (131). In a century that has encouraged displacement, mobility, and the monotonous safety of suburban life, many readers turn to essays ofplace for anchoring. Such narratives serve other purposes as well. In the waning years of the twentieth 2 7 4 WAL 3 7 . 2 SUMM ER 2 0 0 2 century, writers and readers alike have been trying to assess the effects of nineteenth -century desires, myths, and laws on the western landscape. Family itself bears the imprint of lingering patriarchy. How have our great-grandfathers’ and great-grandmothers’ dreams shaped the world we have inherited? Bair grows up in the house her great-grandfather built, where the past continually edges into her present life. Even the land itself, “plotted and aligned,” speaks to the for­ mal designs of a now dead century (64). As she stands outside the homestead, Bair recalls that “[e]ven the silence had human voices in it” (64). Amidst such powerful ghosts, Bair struggles to define her own life. Place is formative: “Where you live becomes what you know, becomes who you are,” Bair admits (134). Still, “Kansas values are male” (129). Witnessing the “censure of the maternal” that silenced her mother, Bair under­ stands that “[p]arts of me simply can’t have existence here” (129). Like many who grew up in the 1950s and ’60s, Bair escaped the suffocation of home life through an early marriage...