Unassigned Territory by Kem Nunn (review)

Reviews 167 Voices of a Place. By Gerald Haslam. (Walnut Creek, California: Devil Moun­ tain Books, 1987. 100 pages, $7.95.) Since Europeans set foot on this continent, the subjects of literary pro­ vincialism and regionalism have been issues. Writers have been forced to look eastward, toward sophistication, and of course, the centers of publishing, for acceptance. Now that the western region, according to James D. Houston, “is at a higher level of awareness about the interlocking and interdependent work­ ings of the world,” what will happen to the notion of the unsophisticated provincial writer? Now that the continent, from sea to sea and islands beyond, is aware of itself, what new literary frontiers will emerge? Who will “make it new,” as Idaho native, Ezra Pound insisted? Gerald Haslam’s slim volume of essays explores adeptly the notion of California as literature. He explores the state’sfour geo-literaryregions through discussions of politics, levels of education, language, country music, and even the strange vigilante activities of the Posse Comitatus. He discusses these issues and the people he knows with sympathy and a generous, understanding heart. In his essay “Reflections on California’s Regionalism,” he states: “. . . it is likely that they have been duped by the absurd, if hoary, belief that some­ how eastern American experience is national, while everything else is ‘only’ regional.” Whenever western writers have voiced this concern—from Vardis Fisher onward—they have been brushed aside and labeled paranoid. Haslam’s essays make me feel more secure in my own perceptions as a western writer. Too bad Fisher died too soon to read them. Haslam not only writes fascinating regional fiction, but as these essays prove, he knows why he does. He has put his own work and the work of other regionalists into a challenging perspective. “And that is where all great art must begin, with the actual experiences of people.” PENELOPE REEDY The Redneck Review of Literature Fairfield, Idaho Unassigned Territory. ByKemNunn. (New York: Delacorte Press, 1987. 336 pages, $16.95.) Unassigned Territory is animated by the energy of the baked, empty spaces of the interior. It pushes further into a realm of indeterminability, illu­ sion, paranoia than did Nunn’s first novel, Tapping the Source (1984). Here the author’s use of the desert will remind many readers of Joan Didion, but an equally kindred California analog is the tricksy world of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. In Unassigned Territory, Nunn’s point-of-view characters are a visiting elder in an off-beat religious sect, a young minister mainly interested in avoid­ 168 Western American Literature ing the draft (the Vietnam War looms in the background of both novels), and the son and daughter of Sarge Hummer, who used to run a desert museum exhibiting a bogus monster called “The Mystery of the Mojave.” These char­ acters are set to wandering the desert in a plot nearly defying summary, involv­ ing the theft of the last version of the “Mystery,” which may or may not be the real body of an alien being. The characters, separately and together, encounter elements which may or not link to form an alternative view of reality: among them are the beliefs of a flying saucer cult, the mythology of a lost Indian tribe (both possibly joined by the symbol of a six-fingered hand to west-African witchcraft), mutilations of animals and men in the desert, and three sinister men in a red convertible. Over thirty years ago, Frederick Bracher offered the now notorious pro­ nouncement that California writers had “no cult of the area comparable to the highly articulate feeling of Southern writers for the South, and there is no California myth which writers can exploit or against which they can react” (AQ 7[1955]: 276). There is such a California tradition, and Kem Nunn, having schooled himself within it, now emerges as one of its strong new voices. CHARLES L. CROW Bowling Green State University Ringer. By Marshall Terry. (San Antonio: Corona, 1987. 239 pages, $16.95.) The Ringer family, once the leading citizens of Ringer, Texas, in the Panhandle, now live an anonymous urban existence. The matriarch of the family is...