Warning: Writers at Work by Larry L. King (review)

282 Western American Literature relationship—affection. And in Spanish, it comes after the derogatory “gringo” as a corrective, “el gringo viejo,” which gives it even greater impact (“Gringo simpatico” is a compliment in Spanish!) Fuentes attempts, in El Gringo Viejo, to fuse a tight structure of “reality” and fiction which, from shifting perspectives ranging from omniscience to the limited perceptions of individual characters, builds an experience ofpsycholog­ ical needs sublimated into sexual experience centering on the death wish of the gringo. Except as “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” exemplifies the reality/ fantasy fusion of this novel, it is immaterial that the gringo’s name isAmbrose Bierce. Fuentes, however, attempts much more in this novel than did Bierce in the short story. Not only does the novel move into and out of reality, it also shifts from mind to mind among the characters and the persona of the nar­ rator and from one time to another in the memory of Harriet Winslow, in whose recollection alone the dead characters are preserved. What the novel loses in translation is the differentiation of voice that would allow the reader to identify the shifts in perspective (Who is “speaking” now? and when?) and thus follow—or participate in—the experience of conflict, realization, and resolution which must make the original novel a satisfying experience. MARK A. FOSTER Montgomery, Alabama Warning: Writers at Work. By Larry L. King. (Fort Worth: TCU Press, 1985. 298 pages, $17.95.) Edwin Shrake in the preface says King’s “handful of juicy anecdotes” will especially appeal to a reader who spent three decades in Texas after WWII. Exactly. I felt the pleasure and pain of Brer Rabbit being thrown back into the briar patch. Many readers like me must have been near the figurative tornadoes sug­ gested in the serious essays on Louis Armstrong, LBJ, Brother Dave Gardner, Jessie Hill Ford, redneck blues, and white racists, while King himself reports from the eye of the storm. His truths are often chilling. Eleven of the sixteen essays are “Echoes of Texas.” Others prove that sex and racism can be as scandalous as politics and religion, in Texas or out. King is often witty, often wise. He must not be remembered merely as the man who made “whorehouse” a respectable word in classrooms and newspapers. After reading his insightful essay on the enigmatic Larry McMurtry, you will conclude that this volume belongs on the shelf by In a Narrow Grave. Comparisons are odious, but King is more sensitive, more likeable, and (may God, Country, and King forgive me) more Christian, in the broadest sense, than McMurtry, our “leading” Texas writer. Paul Rigby drawings add to “The Best Collectibles of Larry L. King.” Believe it. JIM BYRD East Texas State University ...