Rats Alley by John H. Irsfeld (review)

170 Western American Literature and terms and put themselves around a drink or so in the process . . . one day of magic filled . . . [with] color and laughter” (12). Unlike his friend Rob, McCaskill takes pleasure in life’s rhythms; he wants to see, says Anna Ramsay, “how many ways life can rhyme” (192). His narrative isone of those efforts at dancing with life, but in Doig that means dancing with storms both of the country and of the heart while keeping your head above water, blizzard, drought, and desire. That dance takes place not just in plot, but most impor­ tantly in narrative vision and language. Ivan Doig has taken chances before—• in This House ofSky and Winter Brothers— and he does soagain with Dancing At The Rascal Fair. The book needs more than one reading in order to get from the plot to the dance, but it works and works well. A. CARL BREDAHL University of Florida Rats Alley. By John H. Irsfeld. (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1987. 201 pages, $16.50.) There’s nothing subtle in Irsfeld’scontinued treatment of a modern Texas socioscape. He uses a boy’s brutal murder by an explosive policeman, an exten­ sive cover-up, and a father’s careful, doomed efforts at revenge to illustrate his sense that this world is a rat’s alley. It’s a place where bad things happen, where, in Eliot’s phrase, dead men lose their bones. Justice is a mockery. Mothers go mad. Jesus doesn’t save. And neither, of course, does John Wayne. If I have reservations about this book, they’re not that Rats Alley is just another version of Arthur Miller’s pathetic integers. Irsfeld tells the story well, and he has the capacity to make moments in the stunted lives of these people vivid and powerful. My reservations are about execution and vision. About execution: I have trouble all the way with Irsfeld’s narrative strategy and pacing and character speech. The point of view, constantly shift­ ing in very short chapters, makes the going lurching and incoherent, especially early on. The method iseconomical, of course, but sometimes efficiency cancels intensity, as, for instance, when the murdered boy’smother goes insane, turning from a needle-pointing hymn-singer to a devil-song chanter in about two pages. At some points, I’m uncomfortably aware of efforts to achieve the talk of scared, frustrated kids and cops. At others, I’m bewildered to find the same person talking in different idioms. And about vision: What happens when the inevitable becomes the flatout predictable? Here, we’re far from any tragedy of revenge, even drama of revenge. We don’t even have Charles Bronson cleaning up Central Park—we have Bernard Goetz turned loose in McDonalds. It’s not just that passion and honor are gone. That’s probably important for Irsfeld to say. It’s that these individuals, plunged separately into violence, don’t know what’s missing. Reviews 171 Finally, it’s all up to us, as readers, to complete the puzzle, to seethe big picture, to protest the system which has savaged nearly everyone. In that, the book may be more a homily than a novel. LORA K. REITER Ottawa University A Man in the Wheatfield. By Robert Laxalt. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1987. 185 pages, $16.00.) A Man in the Wheatfield, firstpublished in 1964, centers on Smale Calder, an American who moves into a desert village, makes no friends and asks for none, runs a gas station, and has a passion for capturing rattlesnakes and keep­ ing them as pets in his backyard. Closely aligned with Calder is Father Savio Lazzaroni who since childhood has had a foreboding dream of a man in a wheatfield, a black featureless figure whom he knows to be the embodiment of evil. He thinks he has identified the image when he meets Calder, probably because of the serpents. The theme is a parable of good and evil, and the dream of Father Lazza­ roni tends to make the narrative a fable. Professor Laxalt gives the reader several imagined situations realistically detailed which are told quietly and chillingly. Most...