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Reviews 273 Wagon (1923) is now regarded as a silent-film classic, while North of 36, though not first-rate in any of its versions (1924, 1931, and 1938), featured elements so exciting that they are responsible for several film clichés — “stampedes, Indian raids, a cavalry charge, and other exciting aspects . . . of trail-drive movies” (p. 138). Here is Professor Wylder’s sad summation: “Hough has left a minor classic of Southwestern literature in Heart’s Desire, and he established some patterns for others to follow in The Covered Wagon and North of 36. That much cannot be claimed for scores of other writers for the popular maga­ zines of the times. More than anything else, Hough recorded his concept of the West in the minds of millions of Americans” (p. 114). ROBERT L. GALE, University of Pittsburgh The Ghosts of Elkhorn. By Kerry Newcomb and Frank Schaefer. (New York: Viking Press, 1982. 261 pages, $12.95.) The heart of this book is a confrontation between the old West and the changes that have urbanized and overwhelmed so much of it. The ghost town of Elkhorn, inhabited by a solitary relic of a gambler-gunslinger, the unquiet spirit of a mountain trapper and an ageless, marauding grizzly, is invaded by a would-be gangster and the girl he stole from a Denver crime czar. This vengeance-obsessed worthy pursues the fleeing pair through various complications to the haunted town of Elkhorn and a finale of gun­ play in the best tradition of the Western. The good and semi-good guys win, after a mixture of true grit and absurd coincidence. This synopsis may not sound compelling, but the book has qualities which eclipse the stereotype from which it comes. The characters are vivid and insightfully drawn and the dialogue has a persistent rhythm and wry humor with the sonorous ring of the stage. The authors, both involved in theater, have a dramatist’s interest in character which lends a nice depth to the working-out of the human equations — loneliness, regret, love, revenge — presented in this book. Years of working on ranches and in the mountains have given me a certain taste for the practical and there are some minor oddments in the book that bothered me, such as a large oak growing in the mountains of Colorado, a Hawken percussion rifle that kicks hard enough to fell a man (when in fact they kick less than a 30.06) and a falcon that stoops at human heads. As Texans, Newcomb and Schaefer might be allowed immunity to such specifics and, applied to a novel which features as a main character the flatulent ghost of a mountain trapper, these observations border on nitpicking. 274 Western American Literature Taken for itself without any grinding of literary axes, The Ghosts of Elkhorn mixes fantasy and human reality with wit, charm and style in a presentation that refreshingly ignores the search for the Holy Grail of “The Western Novel.” C. L. RAWLINS, Cora, Wyoming Rhine Maidens. By Carolyn See. (New York: Coward, McCann and Geohagen, 1981. 272 pages, $13.95.) The title Rhine Maidens seems far-fetched for a novel set mostly in Southern California, where (it must be said) most of the rivers flow in ugly concrete channels. Since the sexually betrayed guardians of the Rheingold in Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle were the ultimate female victims, it is easy to understand how they could tempt the imagination of a modem writer writing about women’s oppression — but Carolyn See has not done for the Rhine Maidens what Sylvia Plath did for the Lorelei. Still, Carolyn See is a sly literary comedienne and one of the better writers chronicling contemporary lifestyles in Southern California. Her char­ acters are never merely the denizens of Tinsel Town or Lotus Land or the Big Avocado; nor do they have a particularly apocalyptic sense of reality. Her avid admiration for Joan Didion begs for a comparison of her own work to that author’s, but See’s literary sensibility is too down to earth and lacking in moral ambition to be a convincing case of hardboiled existentialism. If See’s work lacks the grand sweep...

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