Playing Catch-Up by A. B. Guthrie, Jr (review)

236 Western American Literature Always Coming Home is set thousands of years hence, in a post-industrial California. Our age has vanished, leaving only submerged ruins, pockets of radiation and chemical pollution, some genetic damage, but scarcely a mem­ ory. The valleys are populated by gentle tribes who are, as the book’s last lines remind us, our children, the people we were always trying to become. It is not an entirely unfallen Eden. The Condor people, nomads from (of course) the East, come to threaten with airplanes, tanks, and monotheism, nightmare echoes of our own time. Readers expecting a linear account of the conflict between Kesh and Condor will be frustrated, however. LeGuin has created an anti-novel, mas­ querading as an anthropologist’s study, containing songs (there is even an accompanying cassette), legends, descriptions of the material culture of the Kesh, observations of their ceremonies, charts and tables, and narratives by some of the villagers. The reader is gradually introduced into this world, learns its geography, reads its map, and uncovers its covert science-fiction elements. Sometimes LeGuin steps into her own tale, under the guise of “Pandora,” and discusses with the reader this strange and wonderful work, this “Up Yours to the people who ride snowmobiles, make nuclear weapons, and run prison camps by a middle-aged housewife ... a cannibal dance among the savages in the ungodly garden of the farthest West.” CHARLES L. CROW Bowling Green State University Playing Catch-Up. By A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985. 183 pages, $13.95.) This is the fourth novel in Guthrie’s series of Western-mystery-entertainments , the previous ones being Wild Pitch (1973), The Genuine Article ( 1977), and No Second Wind (1980). This book, as were its predecessors, is a pleasure to read. With the publication of Fair Land, Fair Land (1982), Guthrie apparently completed his chronicle on the opening, settlement, and development of the Northwest—by any standards a major contribution to Western American literature. The Western mystery novels, narrated by Jason Beard, the deputy sheriff of Chick Charleston, are set in a present-day small town in the West. These novels, as the phrase “mystery-entertainments” suggests, make no pretense of continuing Guthrie’s chronicle on the Western movement. Playing Catch-Up is a fast-moving, economically written, first-rate yarn. Jason has matured from the gawky adolescent of Wild Pitch and now has a college degree and hopes to make a career in law enforcement. While waiting to begin his job in Portland, he is talked into helping Charleston investigate the murder of a call girl. During the course of their investigation, two more murders occur. Before the successful solution of the murders, Jason has a chance to show his quick thinking, saving Charleston and himself from likely serious injury or death. In the course of events, Jason’s character is severely Reviews 237 tested when he is tempted to give up his work in law enforcement, saddened by the shocking death of the second victim, a beautiful young high school student, with a promising future as a singer. Jason passes the crucial char­ acter testing, however, and along the way shows mature acts of kindness and compassion. Accompanying the fast-moving plot is Guthrie’s marked talent for realis­ tically picturing the scenes and characters of small-town Western America, and occasional vivid landscape descriptions are effective and nostalgic re­ minders of the magnificent canvases of The Big Sky. THOMAS W. FORD University of Houston Beyond the Mountain. By William Dieter. (New York: Atheneum, 1985. 262 pages, $13.95.) This third novel by William Dieter, advertised as a “Hitchcock thriller,” has ambitions. In its account of the Hartman family, focusing on 21-year-old Brook, it gives us the nostalgia of the post-World-War-I scene (speakeasies and Model T ’s, space and poor roads) ; the conflict between the cattleman and the mining/lumber speculator; the modest “dynasty” complications of these second- and third-generation Coloradans; the allure of the east face of the Rockies; and the suspense of a murder mystery as Brook seeks to puzzle out the multiple versions he hears of his father’s disappearance. To all...