Small Faces by Gary Soto (review)

162 Western American Literature loves Scott Fitzgerald but audibly communes with him. Education, as always in Eastlake, comes in many forms. Gerald Haslam’s seven new stories demonstrate his refusal to accept easy boundaries to his imaginative scope. “The World Sucks” delineates the tragedy America has visited upon herself in the afteryears of its Vietnam veterans and finds the linguistic chronicler of the Okies at home with urban black demotic. Conversely, the Jewish Black Studies professor of “Blackness” is destroyed by his alienation from his own skin. I’m afraid the intrusion of more realistic characterization somewhat compromises the hijinks of the Tejon Club boys in “The Attack of the Great Brandy Bear.” But “Upstream” nears classic status for its homegrown fusion of magic realism and the liberation of the male. The unusual coastal setting of “The Estero” is a haunting backdrop to the emerging Haslam theme of the transcendence, not merely of the human spirit, but of the spirit of life itself. In the title story the religious impulse isembodied in a wise Armenian who blends equal parts of Joyce, Nietzsche, Steinbeck, Saroyan, and local mentors of the author’s childhood. Ironically, another great influence, the grandma of “The Horned Toad,” has here aged into philistinism, red-baiting, and malebashing . She sinks to the nadir of collaboration with a Fire Marshal! This would be a wonderful tale with which to introduce adolescent readers to mature literature. Eastlake and Haslam are national treasures. GERALD I. LOCKLIN California State University at Long Beach Small Faces. By Gary Soto. (Houston: Arte Publico, 1986. 126 pages, n.p.) n.p.) Gary Soto is a prominent member of that remarkable assemblage of bards —the Fresno Poets—that has developed under the tutelage of Philip Levine at California State University, Fresno. His work has been rooted in the place and events of his youth. So what’s he up to now? Small Faces represents a break with Soto’scontinuing output of verse. It is instead a collection of prose sketches and vignettes that range from riveting to interesting, humorous to sad, and that confirm what the writer’s early work has already established:he is a deft, sensitive writer. Each sketch included here, the poet acknowledges, was drafted, though not finished, in a single day, and each explores tangles of memories and events in a unique manner. In one of my favorite pieces, “Like Mexicans,” the young Chicano goes to meet his future wife’s parents, Japanese-Americans, and is offered sushi: “A plate of black and white things were held in front of me. I took one, wideeyed , and turned it over like a foreign coin.” But all is indeed well since it ends well, and Soto’s concluding sentence suggests deep social resonance: “Her people were like Mexicans, only different.” Reviews 163 Predictably, Soto’s language is . . . well, poetic. A pensive father, he describes his young daughter, Mariko in “Taking Notice”: “Her body will be in bud; shoulders, breasts, the hip’s curve like a mathematical equation that can’t be solved.” Another equation that can’t be solved is the one that allows an artist to see and say things that most people simply miss. Gary Soto is, in any case, one of the gifted, and this slim book is a joy to read, even when, wondering about the endless palaver of intellectuals, he brings a reader up short: Today we want an indirect life: we want to talk, to think about our fate, that blackness, that grave that will rain dirt on our faces and run a root through an ear until we can really hear. GERALD W. HASLAM Sonoma State University Prize Stories: Texas Institute of Letters. Edited and with an Introduction by Marshall Terry. (Dallas: Still Point Press, 1986. 214 pages, $18.95.) Even if Prize Stories hadn’t received an Award of Merit at the Western Books Exhibition, it would deserve to be read and recognized as outstanding because of the excellent short stories contained between its covers. The fourteen stories here were chosen, from 1972 to 1984, as the “best” Texas short stories for each of the given years (two of them tied for the award in...