Plaintext: Essays by Nancy Mairs (review)

70 Western American Literature pain appears in a bandaged arm, one cowboy down in the arena, and refer­ ence to another man killed in a bulldogging accident. Captions reveal the names of some men and identify locations in various parts of the American West, mostly Wyoming, Texas, Idaho, Colorado, Oregon, and California. A limited edition of five thousand copies in casebound covers, the book features inside the covers portraits of eight young bronc riders, most of them with their gear. Followers and scholars of the sport will find much to admire in this unusual book that documents the contemporary rodeo cowboy. LAWRENCE CLAYTON Hardin-Simmons University Plaintext: Essays. By Nancy Mairs. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986. 154 pages, $15.95.) Nancy Mairs is a well-known poet. Her book In All the Rooms of the Yellow House won a recent Western States Book Award for poetry. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Arizona, where she is a project director for the Southwest Institute for Research on Women. Plaintext is her first collection of essays. A feminist, Mairs is unafraid to confront the rough strife of her own life as a woman. These are personal essays. They discuss sexism, suicide attempts, rape, physical disability and the realities of motherhood. “I have tried to make everything clear, plain, to myself first and then to others who may then make the leap to making their own experiences plain to themselves,” she says. Her words sound like a retort straight from Georgia O’Keeffe. They have elan. and the suggestion of an ability to execute clean, hard aesthetic decisions. The essays frequently break through to a ravishing limpidity. “I am always having the types of adventures that are mine to have” is Mairs’playful summation of an essay on the limitations of having agoraphobia and multiple sclerosis. The adventure that day was merely being able to get through a lunch date at a ferny “California-type restaurant.” The title Plaintext seems to allude to both early American plainsong and post-structuralist feminism. It somehow suggests an intellectual complexity that Mairs doesn’t always deliver. Her attempt to link her mental illness with the oppression of women in patriarchal society, for example, would have been strengthened had she demonstrated some mastery of contemporary theories of borderline personality disorder. Instead, she falls back on the jargon of consciousness-raising: “madness,” “cultural prisoner” and the like. Still, the essays are formidably accomplished. They are among the best we have that come from the feminist experience. JANIS HELBERT Pacific Palisades, California ...