The Fork River Space Project by Wright Morris (review)

186 Western American Literature sister’s ships reached a safe berth on the opposite shore. Across the pond, across life, I hope their voyage was a pleaant one. KEVIN STARR, San Francisco, California The Fork River Space Project. By Wright Morris. (New York: Harper & Row, 1977. 195 pages, $8.95.) Wright Morris has remarked that successful fiction dealing with the Great Plains should rightfully reveal some of that region’s more notable characteristics: like Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie architecture it should express itself in clarity of outline, simplicity of design, and the like. Yet over the course of his literary career Morris has increasingly emphasized that these apparently simple linear qualities of prairie life often conceal more than they reveal. As a result, his fiction has become increasingly ambivalent in meaning, while remaining formally straightforward. The high reputation Morris holds as a “writer’s writer” largely depends upon the success with which he is able to hold in suspension the apparent contradiction between his direct narrative line and its ambiguous content. Morris’s chosen “field of vision,” to pun seriously on the title of an earlier novel, does not appeal to everyone, most especially to those who find the often jarring juxtaposition of the ironic vision implied by his style with the inherently mystical content of his stories more irritating than illuminating. Such readers should not bother wth Morris’s newest novel, The Fork River Space Project. Yet those who are hooked on Morris’s writing will find this latest book as intriguing as his earlier ones. The plot itself is slight, and apparently trendy: was it a flying saucer or some other conveyance from outer space which caused the “incident” in the town of Fork River, Kansas, during the Second World War in which an undetermined number of victor)' gardeners mysteriously disappeared? Those who do not find either this question or its answer of striking meta­ physical urgency should not pick the book up, especially because they will be disappointed to discover that no solution is given. We do not have here any charioteers of the gods or malevolent Atlanteans snatching helpless earthlings from Bermuda triangles. What we have instead is an exploration of the nature of wonder. Where much modem pseudo-science depends for its effects upon solemnly alleged facts of dubious authenticity as proof of whatever ridiculous thesis is being advocated, Morris sees much deeper: anything, he suggests, can be accepted with sufficient proof; faith requires belief without proof. Morris’s new novel is much nearer in its thrust to Tertullian’s axiom credibile quia ineptum (it is believable because it is absurd) than it is to that science Reviews 187 fiction with which it will inevitably be compared. One of the novel’s four major characters, a house painter named either O. P. Dahlberg or P. O. Bergdahl (we are never sure which), who has two entirely self-consistent but logically contradictory pasts depending upon which name we assume is really his, puts the point explicitly. To the narrator’s wife Alice he says “I want to restore awe,” for “without awe we diminish, we trivialize, every­ thing we touch” (p. 113). For Morris the modem world, with everything in plain sight, has lost its very capacity for awe, and here perhaps is where Morris shares a common Western vision. The sentimentalized, nostalgically remembered good old days are an obvious staple commodity of much Western writing, which often mourns the loss of a romantic past. Morris’s near uniqueness among modern practitioners of Western story lies in his deeply felt belief that the capacity for wonder must constantly be renewed, and that nothing is so futile as regret. To him westering is not primarily seen in external terms: neither a geographical place nor a temporal era, it is instead an individual spiritual necessity. The past is dead: long live the future! JAMES K. FOLSOM The University of Colorado A Literary History of Iowa. By Clarence A. Andrews. (Iowa City: Uni­ versity of Iowa Press, 1972. 287 pages, $7.50.) One of America’s leading literary scholars, Robert Spiller, has argued on several occasions that notable literary history must be a judicious mixture of biography, cultural history...