Hear Him Roar: A Novel by Andrew Wingfield (review)

B o o k R E VIEW S 1 0 3 the true spirituality that lies within its traditions, she has an affair with an anthropologist who believes the Indian tribal ways are a part of history, not the present. It is this character who will try, and fail, to tame Ruth. The paramount symbol of the wilderness is the title character, Juniper Blue, a blue roan Ruth acquires after seeing him run wild. Blue represents the beauty and wildness of the life Ruth cherishes, and he provides the catalyst that tests Ruth’s resolve to have an independent existence at Glory Springs. Ruth’s determination in the last pages of the novel not to marry the man who wants to “civilize” her is the parting shot that affirms Lang’s theme of wilderness and her protagonist’s strength. Despite the challenges of continuing to homestead, Ruth finds that she and her two children will stay, alone, in this “place of small rocks rising. ... She remember[s] the taste of its plants and animals. ... [She] finally understands] that only in this place [is] she fully herself” (325). In Juniper Blue, Lang fulfills a reviewer’swish that her second novel will again explore what Rawlings calls “vividly placed and questing characters” (219). One can hold expectations that the third novel of this trilogy will do the same. Hear Him Roar: A Novel. By Andrew Wingfield. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2005. 225 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Harriet Rafter San Francisco State University Sacramento, California. Suburban sprawl blocking out the view of the Sierras. Too much freeway traffic. Old neighborhoods gentrified into swanky shopping districts for newcomers. Government jobs shut down for lack of funding. History, the meaning of the past and impossibility of reconciling it to the present . Joan Didion and Richard Rodriguez own this country, stranger, and if you want to add your two bits, it had better be good. History— personal and communal— and change fill Andrew Wingfield’s Hear Him Roar. Charlie Sayers, its middle-aged protagonist, has postponed fac­ ing some traumatic facts of life. He grew up fearing the cruelty of his father and uncle. This certainly contributed to his refusal to bend the notions of masculine behavior he demanded of his own son. That son died in an early snowstorm while camping in the Sierras undergoing the kind of masculine initiation he felt that Charlie expected, and (no surprise) Charlie’s marriage shattered upon his son’sdeath. In the course of the novel, Charlie runs away from the lover he has lived with for several years and entertains an unrequited crush on a much younger woman. Work provides no relief. When the Department of Wildlife closes the lab where he is happily employed, he chooses to stay on the payroll to oversee worthless community-relations programs. Charlie’sreluctant rehabilitation begins when a mountain lion kills ajogger, setting off a war between those who want to protect the cats and those who want to hunt them. The reactions of these suburbanites allow Wingfield to 1 0 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S p r in g 2 0 0 7 laugh at their credulity, their propensity to overreact, and their ill will toward the feline killer they so gleefully insist on seeing everywhere. Indeed, Wingfield uses humor and small gestures to tell what could have been a darker, more turbulent story. In addition to mountain lion hunters, he affectionately comments on computer gadgets, new-age advice books and self-styled gurus, and the middle-class, midlife anxieties that make people think they need them. Wingfield has surrounded Charlie with the most understanding women (his ex-wife, daughter, current lover, and fantasy crush) this side of a Dickens novel, who recommend books and a guru to ease the distress that Charlie denies. We never forget that Charlie isworking out his midlife reckoning in the con­ temporary West. The novel ispermeated with his observations about sprawl, traf­ fic, vistas shut off, subtle signs of changing seasons where seasons supposedly do not change, subtle gradations of belonging where long...