Blanco by Allen Wier (review)

Reviews 329 tion accounts for the particular selections. One must assume that inflated publishing costs forced the editors into certain strictures. Nevertheless, I would have welcomed more poems by more poets, elaboration on the part of Stanford, and some amplification of the often convoluted “biobibliog­ raphies” at the end. No matter; the sampling is tantalizing enough. Tasty and refreshing, this slim volume is a pleasing hors d’oeuvre for readers of many appetites. ANN RONALD, University of Nevada/Reno Blanco. By Allen Wier. (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State Uni­ versity Press, 1978. 234 pages, $9.95.) Blanco, Allen Wier’s first novel, starts off well; the opening page intro­ duces us to the town in a manner reminiscent of Henry James’ famous tally of what America did not contain: no established church, no peerage, no army, etc. Wier’s Blanco contains even fewer marks of civilization: no news­ paper, no hospital, no jail. The time is 1959. But the novel begins to get into trouble on the second page, when the characters are introduced. For Wier’s characters, although they have impressed some reviewers as memor­ able, strike me as being unconvincing and derivative, drawn from literature rather than from life. There’s Turk, for example, a redneck, a good oF boy with two part-time jobs, one pumping gas, the other mowing the graveyard. Turk is so stupid that even his fellow rednecks, as children, recognized the fact and named him after the idiotic tendency baby turkeys are said to have of opening their mouths when it rains, thereby drowning. Turk is certainly obnoxious, as we know by page five when he flicks his shorn toenails against the tv screen. Turk’s mom is equally stereotypical, a whining standard-issue Southern gothic non-entity. I am going to tell what happens to Turk, just to set the record straight. Maureen Howard, praising Blanco in the Yale Review, says, “Escape is indicated at the end for both June [Turk’s sister] and Turk” (“Eight Recent Novels,” Yale Review, LXVIII [Spring 1979], 442). Some escape! Turk kills himself in Chapter Twenty with thirteen chapters to go. But how Turk kills himself is the really astonishing thing. First, he shotguns to death three Mexicans he catches robbing the gas station he works for; then he commits suicide by causing the hydraulic lift used to grease cars, to squash him to death. Does he perform his remarkable feat out of remorse for the Mexicans? No, he hates Mexicans. Why then? We never know; perhaps it’s because he grew melancholy mowing the graveyard. His sister June has left Blanco when the novel opens; I think I know 330 Western American Literature why. There are no gynecologists in Blanco. But there are in San Antonio, where June lives and where she meets the other major character of the novel, a man that she marries. His name is Cage. If Turk and his momma derive from Southern fiction, June has a different lineage; she’s straight out of Joyce Carol Oates. June is a daughter of gynecological fiction. In such novels a woman is traumatized by visiting a gynecologist, after which she begins to do odd things like wear mink coats without any underclothes, engage in what used to be called self-abuse, take picture of her breasts, pudendum, knees, etc., in cheap bus-station photo-booths, and drive big cars on the freeways while combining the first two activities listed above. The epigraph, from Wallace Stevens, suggests that “the madness of space” is to be the theme of the novel, but it is the author’s literary educa­ tion, I suspect, and not the small, empty town of Blanco, that is the source of all the unearned nihilism of this smoothly written but pretentious fiction. DON GRAHAM, University of Texas at Austin The Collected Writings of Frederic Remington. Edited by Peggy and Harold Samuels. (New York: Doubleday &Co., Inc., 1979. 649 pages, $19.95.) In 1882 George R. Buckman wrote in Lippincott’s Magazine of the exodus from the East of collegians and professionals: “It may safely be said,” he opined, “that nine-tenths of those engaged in the stock-business in the Far...