The Impossible Land: Story and Place in California's Imperial Valley (review)

For more than a decade, interest in regionalism has increased notably, with books by Stephanie Foote (2001), Heike Schaefer (2004), Tom Lutz (2005), Douglas Reichert Powell (2007), a hefty anthology edited by Charles Crow (2003), and many others. Phillip Round's book contributes to these conversations, though he seems less concerned with the concept of region than with close-grained analysis of his chosen territory. For Round, Imperial Valley stories involve "relations of individual human imaginations to the material conditions of landscape in a specific historical milieu," which means that "place is never fixed and the stories about it never quite finished" (15). Using twentieth-century texts from the Imperial Valley, one of the poorest, "driest and most barren places" in the nation, he shows how complex (or "impossible") narratives of a place can be (4).

Round divides the book into two parts, the first three chapters dealing with the "popular strands of cosmopolitan storytelling" and the last three with the "storytelling of the 'others'" (15). After a brief introduction to the geographic and historical background, Round traces the evolving image of the Imperial Valley in three key texts: John C. Van Dyke's The Desert (1901), Harold Bell Wright's The Winning of Barbara Worth (1911), and Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor's book American Exodus (1940), devoting an entire chapter to each book. Van Dyke, for example, sought an aesthetic sublime in the "silence and desolation" of the desert, while Wright managed to combine "sex and land and reclamation," recasting irrigation as progress and making it a moral imperative for the nation (38, 60). Lange and Taylor, with photographs and sociology, shifted the discussion a third time, away from a celebration of reclamation and toward an examination of its "human costs" (75).

The second half of the book, moving from Japanese Americans to Mexican Americans to Native Americans, treats a single group in each chapter. In one of the strongest chapters, Round examines the work of Wakako Yamauchi, who lived in an Imperial Valley internment camp during the 1940s, deftly exploring how she symbolically figured the desert as both "alienation and an emblem of imagination and escape" (122). When he turns to Mexican and Mexican American narratives, Round expands his original geography to include places on the other side of the border (such as Mexicali), focusing on José Antonio Villareal's Pocho (1959) and Gabriel Trujillo Muñoz. Finally, Round explores Native American story-telling, primarily via Delfina Cuero: Her Autobiography (1991) and Cahuilla "Bird Songs." One might question why Round chose to place the Native Americans (who were first to inhabit the region) last in the book; however, this strategy also allows him to give them the last word.

Story and place remain crucial concepts in our understanding of western American literature, a field in which language and geography are inextricably (indeed impossibly) intertwined. Phillip Round's book, in examining one "impossible" place, uncovers themes that will be familiar to readers of many western places and contributes to this important conversation on the relationship between region and narrative.