Touch the Sun by Kaye Klem (review)

155 I do want to go into screen writing. I’ve found that I enjoy it, that it is less lonely and much less isolating than writing novels, and that it may turn out to be just as satisfying creatively. . . . I don’t have any very firm convictions about it yet, except that I am very fatigued with writing novels, and I would like to investigate screen writing either as a possible new line of work completely or, at the very least, as a balance to writing novels. . . . I don’t believe it could possibly be good to go on pouring out book after book of fiction. . . . I think if you’ve been writing for fifteen years you very much need a change—maybe not quit writing completly, but go into a kind of writing that uses your linguistic abilities in a different way.8 From these personal remarks and the unqualified success of his screen­ play for The Last Picture Show, it seem only logical to conclude that McMurtry will be “movin’ on.” Certainly, whatever personal reservations he held before the film’s release have been removed, and the possibility of his going into screen writing as a “completely new line of work’ is very likely, indeed. Furthermore, it may be a very wise decision, for his fatigue and loneliness are easily discernible throughout the story of his alter-ego, Danny Deck. One can only hope, however, that he will not remove his exceptional talent to where all of his friends actually will become strangers. Alan F. Crooks, University of Utah Touch the Sun. By Kaye Klein. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1971. 232 pages. $5.95.) Touch the Sun is billed on the dust jacket as “an exciting novel of tem­ pestuous love set against the high drama of silver mining in Virginia City.” The writer of this book turns out to be Kaye Klem, a “young housewife and mother, and a former newspaper woman who lives in St. Charles, Missouri.” This is, not surprisingly, her first novel. Mrs. Klem informs us in a Foreword that she has researched “the kaleidoscopic history of Virginia City,” but that the novel’s “people and the mines they fight for [are] a novelist’s mixture of fact, event, and imagination.” This fictional work could be considered a Western because of its setting and membership in the popular Doubleday Westerns series, but Touch the Sun is primarily a sentimental tale of the sort that has traditionally been directed toward an audience of adolescent girls. It has much more in common with the simple formula novels of Susanna Rowson or Ann Radcliffe than novels in the tradition of quality Western literature. As Mrs. Radcliffe used European mountains, Gothic castles, dark, swashbuckling heroes, and supernatural events to place her sentimental novels in a picturesque setting, so Mrs. Klem uses the Sierras, the Comstock Lode, bonanzas, and nature, “whose whims made de­ struction and death a daily threat of life in the mines." Today’s adolescent girls are still known for their simplicity and their sentiment, witness the ubi­ quitous fuzzy creature toys, Happy Face buttons, and Love Story posters. This thought, coupled with the novel’s crenelated petticoat and celluloid collar “lovers,” John Donahan and Cassandra Price, makes one wonder if the current national craze for nostalgia persuaded Doubleday to publish this volume. 8Interview . . . . 10 June 1971. 156 Western American Literature As one would expect, the novel treats violence as a picturesque scene fraught with romantic possibilities. In describing a disastrous accident, Klem’s writing breaks out with a lyrical excitement. Fire in the mines! . . . . Men ran blindly down crosscuts and drifts like trapped deer, frantically trying to reach their one avenue of es­ cape, the shaft that rose vertical to the surface. Panic spread like smallpox. Men piled one behind another at the hoisting stations, crowding onto the platform of the cage that literally hung from their thread of life. . . . (p. 4) And what about love and sex? Well, Mrs. Klem’s interest in picturesque vio­ lence continues, but the unintentional comic intrudes vide cliché writing, mildewed from storage in Old Time novels. How about this for 1971? She resisted one more time...