A Day Late by Carolyn Doty (review)

62 Western American Literature More objectionable, I think, is the tendency to overgeneralize. Myth is used to mean both illusion and reality. Archetypal is used to mean both a national paradigm and a universal paradigm. Mimesis is said to be the guiding principle of authenticity, although the terms are probably opposite one another. Romantic and pastoral are used as if they were synonyms. There is a recurrence of either/or distinctions: the West is irrational, the East rational; western landscape is masculine, the eastern feminine. And the practical criticism is essentially judgmental, lacking in explicative support. It is a bit awkward to announce in the introduction the intention of defending quality western fiction against the attacks of eastern critics and then to report that three of the six novelists selected to represent the best (Fisher, Guthrie, and Manfred) have only about one good novel each. Basically, Milton seems to believe that good western fiction should be authentic, have a clear theme (favorite words are lesson, learn, statement), use some literary device to keep the meaning from being too obvious, and center on a connection with land which should be, in kind, spiritual, mysti­ cal, or irrational. Since the desire for a clear statement or theme seems to pull against the desire for the mystical and irrational, some clarification would be useful. The strengths of The Novel of the American West are also easy to identify, and they center, I think, on the somewhat unusual nature of this book. John Milton has been, for at least two decades, a leader in the field of western American literature. He is a distinguished scholar, editor, teacher, a poet of significant importance, and he is the author of a much-debated novel. What we have here is a book in which a distinguished scholar tells us what he thinks, and what John Milton thinks is based on sincere devo­ tion, a bold intelligence, and an absolutely incredible amount of knowledge. Readers will agree and disagree with this or that judgment, but The Novel of the American West is a scholarly and provocative study which will reward the questioning reader. MAX WESTBROOK, University of Texas, Austin A Day Late. By Carolyn Doty. (New York: The Viking Press, 1980. 232 pages, $10.95.) A Day Late is first-time novelist Carolyn Doty’s melodramatic attempt to join the ranks of the parodists of the far western road novel. Her stab at a bravura characterization of Sam Batinovich, a contemporary anti-hero who services his whopping five state cleaning solvent sales territory in an ego-deflating, company-provided “new Chevrolet station wagon with wood paneled sides” is a good start, but Doty’s craft is not up to the level of her ambition to provide a serio-comic treatment of the effects of Sam’s indul­ gence in father-daughter incest within the road novel genre. She seems to Reviews 63 use the rhythms of the road to drown out the moral claims of underage female victims of sexual exploitation in a misguided effort to avoid senti­ mentalizing their plight. The plot takes off when Sam picks up footloose seventeen-year-old Katy Daniels in his Chevy wagon at the Bonneville Salt Flats highway rest station and sidewinds its way through a variety of Sunbelt set pieces (wayside stops in diners; encounters with real cowboys and religious funda­ mentalists) on the way to its dubious “climax” in a motel in Winnemucca, Nevada. There, all too inevitably, Sam and Katy sleep together. Sam has been unable to mourn the recent death of his daughter Julianna because of guilt over his use of her, and Katy’s youth allows Sam to get his head together by re-enacting his past incestuous behavior with a surrogate. Doty strains for an uplifting impact from this hooey plot turn, which hinges on being able to convince the reader that Sam is not just sexually victimizing another teenager. Doty’s ragged characterization of Katy is slanted to por­ tray her as a consenting child-woman, but actually she has been abandoned by her affluent Berkeley family. Equally clunky are the depiction of Sam’s lower middle class environs of Albany, California, and a...