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74 Western American Literature Consider the assailant he details in “The Underground Parking” : A man who holds fear Like the lung a spot of cancer, Waits for your wife. These images are at once likely and terrifying. But Soto’s characters, much like his metaphors, are transcendent. Imaginatively they rise above the meanness of their appearance, not as unscarred ideologues or saints or rhetoricians, but as human — frail and impoverished — whose heritage is simply and redemptively the earth. JERRY BRADLEY, New Mexico Tech American Indian Fiction. By Charles R. Larson. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978. 208 pages, $9.50.) Larson’s study discusses sixteen novels by fourteen authors. It does not deal with the short story (I believe no collection of stories by a single Indian author has yet been published), and limits itself rigorously to those novels written by Indian authors; thus, such novels as Laughing Boy, The Man Who Killed the Deer, and Little Big Man lie outside its scope, despite a long chapter — the second — about changing views of Pocahontas which would seem to have been better saved for another book (none of these six­ teen novels mentions Pocahontas). Within these limitations, Larson’s book is an excellent introduction to American Indian fiction. Larson sees four stages in the history of Indian fiction. The first, which he calls assimilationist, includes Chief Simon Pokagon’s Queen of the Woods (1899), John M. Oskison’s Wild Harvest (1925), Black Jack Davy (1926), and Brothers Three (1935), and John J. Mathews’ Sundown (1934). A second group Larson sees as rejecting assimilation but offering no hopeful alternative: D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded (1936) and Scott Momaday ’s House Made Of Dawn (1969). A third group of novels is concerned with reinterpreting history: Dallas Chief Eagle’s Winter Count (1967), Hyemeyohsts Storm’s Seven Arrows (1974), and Denton R. Bedford’s Tsali (1972). A final group Larson calls “Survivors of the Relocation.” These novels all deal with the reservation not as ghetto or concentration camp, but as “a refuge for spiritual and cultural survival.” They include: George Pierre’s Autumn’s Bounty (1972), James Welch’s Winter in the Blood (1974), Leslie Silko’s Ceremony (1976), and Nasnaga’s Indians’ Summer (1975). Two novels whose authorship is in doubt are discussed in appendices. Larson’s suggestion of four distinct phases in Indian fiction is useful, though House Made of Dawn would seem to more properly belong in the Reviews 75 fourth group, with The Surrounded a transitional work between the first and fourth groups. However, his interest in these novels is primarily as social fiction produced by an American minority group (Larson’s other books include The Emergence of African Fiction and The Novel in the Third World). For example, he seems not to have immersed himself suffi­ ciently in Indian metaphysics to read House Made of Dawn as most critics have felt Momaday meant it. Thus, his failure to understand the conflict between Abel and the albino seems to stem from a lack of information about Southwestern beliefs concerning witches, and his statement that Abel has, by the end, come home to die seems to result from failure to under­ stand either the Navajo chants as Benally uses them to begin Abel’s healing process or the “running after evil” with which the novel closes and begins. Except for House Made of Dawn, Larson’s literary and social judg­ ments are useful. His praise of D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded is judicious and merited; at its best, The Surrounded is fully as good as any of the better-known novels in this study. (University of New Mexico Press has performed a genuine service by reissuing the novel this year.) However, The Surounded and, possibly, Sundown, are the only “discoveries” here; the other novels are, as Larson suggests, chiefly of historical rather than literary interest. WAYNE UDE, Colorado State University The Novels of Wright Morris. By G. B. Crump. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978. 258 pages, $12.95.) Although the opening of The Novels of Wright Morris contains the suggestion that the book was written to clarify Morris’ novels, the critical work seems to me less lucid...

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