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174 Western American Literature Faraway Places. By Tom Spanbauer. (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1988. 124 pages, $16.95.) Thirteen-year-old Jacob Weber, the narrator ofFarawayPlaces, witnesses two bloody murders, passes out, and awakens in a bed in St. Anthony’shospital. Sneaking out of his room, the boy hitches a ride with some drunken Indians and returns to his parents’farm, where he discovers another body, one already partially eaten by crows. Set in the early 1950s, Spanbauer’s novel is Jacob’s story of these killings and of the Webers’loss of their farm after a year of cropdestroying drought. We learn, too, about the Webers’ earlier lives and about their struggle to survive in an isolated area near the Portneuf River in eastern Idaho. Although a young narrator, Jacob knows more about the world than Huck Finn does, but he resembles Huck in being a keen observer. In telling his story Jacob gives the reader a sense of the region’s social diversity: besides the Webers, who are Roman Catholics, the novel’s characters include Mor­ mons, Shoshone-Bannocks, and Blacks. With Cather-like concision, Spanbauer sketches richly resonant scenes of farm life and of a small-town rodeo and a county fair. The novel is also rich with symbols, and woven into the narrative are religious, historical, social, and psychological themes. Tied to eastern Idaho, the characters’ lives are also shaped by “faraway places”—and place comes to matter, as it does in great literature everywhere, because in a sense an artistically realized place lives too. Favorably reviewed in The New York Times, Faraway Places may remind some readers of Faulkner, others of Richard Ford. And anyone who has read Vardis Fisher’s early work will probably see similarities between Spanbauer’s novel and Fisher’s Antelope Hills series. Like Faulkner, Spanbauer shows the grip of the past on the present; like Ford, his New West is bleak and brutal; and like Vridar Hunter, Jacob Weber lives in a world of troubling contrasts between beauty and ugliness, love and violence. This is Spanbauer’s first pub­ lished novel, and if his subsequent works surpass this impressive achievement, then the Antelope Hills will at last have a worthy successor to Vardis Fisher. JAMES H. MAGUIRE Boise State University The Wake of the General Bliss. By Edward Lueders. (Salt Lake City: Uni­ versity of Utah Press, 1989. 188 pages, $15.95.) In this very fine novel Ed Lueders captures the reader deftly with his peripatetic, picaresque dance around three musicians on a troopship who look back at the wake, remembering their own small parts in a very big war. The men play solos, each on his own chosen instrument: S/Sgt. LeRoy Warner, Reviews 175 guitar; Sgt. Stanley Norman, drums or weak bass; Sgt. Mark Reiter, piano. Together they make up The Roy Warner Trio, and when they play, they turn their ordinary lives into ballads, the whole novel becoming a performance— a dance of music and language that says more than either medium could alone. Jazz is of course the underlying language. Perhaps only Ed Lueders— a gifted jazz pianist and writer (The Clam Lake Papers)—could have written this seemingly simple, yet immensely complex, powerful cuento of our times. He makes the sea his central metaphor, the troopship USS GeneralSimon P. Bliss almost one of the characters, and held within this metaphor of the sea is a mythic tale of a man who may or may not have fallen overboard. (The Man Overboard himself seems hardly character at first, for He is Lost. No one seems to know even His name.) Later, this man becomes very important to the three men who merely rode that ship back from World War II to unknown destinies. In the end, the name of the Man Overboard can’t be separated from nine names of men supposedly aboard the General Blissbut who do not answer at the huge roll call—eight of whom seem to be even more mysteriously lost than is the Man Overboard. Lueders’ novel could be favorably compared with Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools in the sense that The Wake of the General Bliss is...

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