High Country: A Novel by Willard Wyman (review)

3 3 0 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 8 Rio’s Robert Laxalt: La voz de los vascos en la literatura norteamericana (2002) is the first book-length study of Laxalt’s writing, recently translated into English and published in the United States to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Sweet Promised Land. Only two of Laxalt’s books are available in Basque-language editions, and only a few have been translated into Spanish. Hence, Rio’s study is of necessity descriptive, offering plot summaries, literary analyses, and biographical infor­ mation. Particular strengths include Rio’s extensive research, which includes the Robert Laxalt papers at the University of Nevada, Reno; English-, Spanish-, and Basque-language articles and reviews; and interviews that Rio conducted in the 1990s with Laxalt, his family members, and close colleagues. Rio’s readings are sensitive and skillful, adept at interpreting motifs of initiation, contextualizing immigrant identity, and revealing the aesthetics of some of Laxalt’s more kaleidoscopic texts. At the same time, Rio’s willingness to be critical has to overcome his friendship with Laxalt, and his focus on the role played by Basques in Laxalt’s stories inevitably obscures other elements of Laxalt’s multi­ faceted work, including his critically acclaimed novel A Man in the Wheatfield (1964), a book centered on a community of Italian immigrants in Nevada. Rio thus brings overdue, critical attention to Robert Laxalt and offers a valuable survey of his work, opening up rewarding terrain for future critics. High Country: A Novel. By Willard Wyman. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. 362 pages, $16.95. Reviewed by Stephen Tatum University of Utah, Salt Lake City The “high country” referred to in the title of this 2005 award-winning novel, now available in paperback, is both that of Montana’s Swan Range and that por­ tion of the Sierra Nevada Range marked by Mt. Whitney and the headwaters of the Kern River. Here in this mountain topography, Willard Wyman’s engaging first novel chronicles, over approximately a fifty-year period, the adventures and romances of central character Ty Hardin, whom we first encounter as a deter­ mined fifteen-year-old on horseback rescuing a half-frozen calf on the family ranch that had been taken over by “the big outfit” during the Great Depression. With the exception of a long chapter that flashes back a decade to describe the background of Hardin’s packer mentor, “Book One: The Swan”—which occu­ pies nearly three-fourths of the novel’s pages— centers on Hardin’s initiation into the high country’s packer culture after he leaves his family’s hardscrabble life in the Bitterroot Valley, his eventual military service in World War II, and, finally, a short-lived marriage that ends in tragedy during childbirth. “Book Two: The Sierra (1950-1984)” details Hardin’s adult years as a packer explor­ ing the Sierras much as he had earlier learned to “read” the Swan Range can­ yons and trails; this section’s growing elegiac tone and subject confirmed by a climactic moment centering on another Hardin search-and-rescue attempt. B o o k R e v ie w s 3 3 1 As a historical novel of formation that some reviewers have compared to the ambition of Lonesome Dove (1985), High Country details in serial fashion Hardin’s intuitive skills with working horses and mules; the expansion of his social, cultural, and sexual horizons; and his haunted maturity as he encounters the sorrowful complexities of love and death. He also witnesses the changes in the high-country tenain due to technology and recreational tourism. The nov­ el’s central tension is thus both geographical and historical. The plot oscillates between events in the mountains and in the rural valley towns. The novel’s repetition of the rescue motif, its allusions to popular music and dance, and its staging of various human and animal deaths mark the novel’s great theme of relentless change and transformation. The geographical and historical tension converges in the wake of one of the...