Shadow of Thunder by Max Evan (review)

Reviews 235 hurricanes,” and close by, at night, you could see the sharks. During the day, the sharks stayed away, but “if they did come in you could see their shadows a long way away.” The islands of the title are profane—a home that is temporal though built with love and care, a summer vacation with your three sons, a time in the past in Paris remembered now as an act of devotion— but the stream of the title is primordial; and the stream is alive with sharks and with an evil that casts no warning shadow. The story emphasizes this threat, this powerful evil that may spring at any moment into the idylic peace of a good time, a good marriage, a welldisciplined combat crew. The natural dangers of the sea are stressed, especially in “Bimini,” the first section of the book (which, by the way, was reprinted in part and inadequately in Esquire); and natural dangers bear a haunting kinship with the natural evil that is in all good men. Two of Thomas Hudson’s boys are described in terms of animals; Thomas Hudson, Roger Davis, and others discuss the evil they carry inside themselves. That much of this discussion is poorly written should not obscure the fact that Hemingway was concerned (most successfully in the dramatic passages) with a malaise more profound than the malaise of Jake Barnes. Thomas Hud­ son has endured the wounds of his youth, and he has kept the values. He knows now, like Santiago, the essential value of politeness, modern man’s selfconscious ritual against an unconscious evil. That Hemingway did not bring it off is granted, but that he was trying once more to go out where he had not gone before should be recognized. Studies more thorough than book reviews will show, I feel, that Islands in the Stream—whatever its merits as a book—calls for a reconsideration of the importance of the archetypel in Hemingway’s vision. Accidental death—like good luck or love gone sour or that first and best time—may have for Heming­ way a base that is less sociological and psychological and more primordial than we have realized. Max W estbrook, University of Texas at Austin Shadow of Thunder. By Max Evans. (Chicago, The Swallow Press Inc., 1969. 78 pages, illus., $5.00.) Shadow of Thunder is about a confidence artist who bewitches a town’s gullible nesters and a rancher’s discontented wife. The itinerant trickster plays his game in New Mexico in the summer of 1937. To hypnotic drumbeats Duvall wields his “outsized” hands, dispenses aphrodisiacs, and promotes communal debauchery. His payment: “love gifts.” But by summer’s end the protagonist, a preoccupied rancher, discerns his duty; his cowboy skills make him the natural hero who revenges his friends, saves his marriage, and destroys Evil. 236 Western American Literature As a novella Shadow of Thunder tries to combine novelistic intricacy and short-story compression. Evans’ yarn is as compelling as any of the Holly­ wood New Morality Westerns. It offers the pleasure of sharp scenes flicking by in a spare, athletic style. In fact, the story’s rushing surface nearly over­ whelms one’s sense of severe disunities of character and event just before the operatic ending. Tidbits of Western sensationalism stampede the narrative in the form of a penis operation on a steer, sundry public and private orgies, a prairie fire, a jaw-breaking, a fatal knifing, a diest-crunching, and a classic decapitation. This pop Naturalism, however, is relieved by normative scenes of domestic life, rural chores, neighborly visits, and trips into town. Max Evans limits his omniscient point of view to the industrious rancher, Rick Ames, and his sensuous wife, Marta, suggestive of the ranch wife in Steinbeck’s “Chrysanthemums.” The result is an intensifying of their marital problem and their differing views of the honey-tongued stranger. Demonstrations of Duvall’s white-and-black magic and its immoral effects on the nesters give to his characterization a dimension so sinister as to symbolize the Devil, Hitler, Tyranny. Unfortunately, much of the dialogue—Western Range, Mexican American, Old World Elegant—seems to me to be trite, leaving unscathed...