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Reviews 261 Rio Grande: Mountains to the Sea. By Jim Bones. (Austin: Texas Monthly Press, 1985. 184 pages, $35.00.) Successful books of landscape photographs poise confidently between artistic statement and editorial content. Jim Bones comes down on the side of subject matter, and the flaws of this lovely book stem from his treading the dry side of that line. Of the 184 pages in Rio Grande, 160 pair a single Bones photograph on the right-hand page with a short caption on the left. Eliot Porter is Bones’ photographic mentor, and the evidence for that abounds, down to photos of birds’ nests and highly detailed “intimate landscapes.” The light is quiet; an occasional image a little too quiet, or included primarily to fill in the story, fails to match the others in impact. At their best, however, Bones’impeccably printed photos capture details and perspectives we rarely attend to, the telling singularities that make this two-thousand-mile river mean something to us whether or not we have been there. Bones writes with respect about the river, strongly and vividly. But his matter-of-fact commentary conflicts at times with the photos. Moody pictures like “Sunset Reflection in Nambe Lake” and “Sunrise on El Capitan” are photographs more of light than landscape, and Bones’ blunt explanatory captions are jarring. In his introductory geological history of the Rio Grande, we read of Proterozoic subduction zones and isostatically higher continents, but at the same time Bones tells us: “what I am after ... is the individual ecstasy of a natural revelation that joins me directly to the land I live on.” From the “mountains to the sea,” Bones does a fine job of showing the river’s phenomenally diverse backcountry and lesser-known drainages such as Peguis Canyon on Mexico’sRio Conchos. His best photographic “revelations” are of rock—sand dunes, canyon walls, badlands. When natural history errors creep into his text, they are biological: tracks identified as ferret where no ferrets live. And I yearn for a stronger sense of history, some sense of Indian and Hispanic farmers along the river. But the strength and integrity of the river’s landscape are here. We see the huge Rio Grande basin differently after this book. With Jim Bones we come to believe that “the roots of the river are in the mountains; the source is in the sea.” STEPHEN TRIMBLE Santa Fe, New Mexico The New Native American Novel: Works in Progress. Edited by Mary Dough­ erty Bartlett. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986. 132pages, $22.50 cloth, $9.95 paper.) The New Native American Novel, a book format edition of the New America journal, consists of short sections from nine currently in-progress and, of course, highly anticipated novels by Native American writers, collected by 262 Western American Literature graduate student Mary Bartlett. Four already known novelists are repre­ sented: from Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen, more wry souls; from Paula Gunn Allen’s Raven’s Road, two lesbian women camped out to watch a nuclear explosion; from N. Scott Momaday’s Set, a preoccupation with a blind-in-one-eyecharacter; and from GeraldVizenor’sMonsignorMissalwait’s Interstate, “episodes in mythic verism.” Other contributors are new to the novel: Glen Martin’s piece from The Shooter has a distasteful chauvinistic slant almost offset by the Faulknerian wild bear who “endures”; Linda Hogan writes of women’s silent presence in The Grace of Wooden Birds',a tentative father/son relationship in Louis Owens’s The Sharpest Sight is complemented by the narrative’s lively diction and energetic images; Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s A Report of the Proceedings focuses on an actual trial transcript; and the Indian/Black heritage of the small-boy protagonist of Michael Dorris’sA Yellof Raft in Blue Water anticipates a refreshingly new metaphor for Native American experience. Without exception, all of these pieces make fascinating promises of what is to come in the various new novels, but since the selections are too short and since absolutely no context is given, we can only judge each piece as if it were a self-contained short story, which is an unfair approach to a novel and its parts. The...

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