A Man in the Wheatfield by Robert Laxalt (review)

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 of the characters are more than traditional types, and the reader asks, “How is evil to be known?” If the author ends by convincing us that Calder, the serpent handler, is an inverted symbol for innocence, he also signifies that the agency for evil is itself neutral and undesigning. The surprise ending may not be so surprising to many. The huge old rattler, in the depths of the stone temple, may be symbolic of Father Lazzaroni, who clings to the gloomy sanctuary of his church to preach malice against the compassionate Calder, whose communication with the serpents he thinks is a ceremony of evil. In the final scenes, “the priest realized that he was seeing his first pure human being, without guise and without fear, as beautiful as his sim­ plicity and as ugly as the very snakes he loved” (168). The burning of the serpents and their agony, the weeping, dying Calder with the brute snake in his hands, and the priest, who recognizes the vision of the man in the wheat­ field of his dream is his own countenance, make this a good story about the nature of man in all times and places, set this time in an American desert, among men who do not understand and often do not like each other. DORYS CROW GROVER East Texas State University ...