Everybody Gets Something Here by Ken Mitchell (review)

Reviews 257 Equipped with his flashlight and notebook, he spent countless nights over a five-year period joining the world of nocturnal animals in California’s Yolla Bolly mountains. Wallace shares his experiences with us in The Dark Range: A Naturalist’s Night Notebook. With sensitivity and an emphasis on detail, Wallace has woven his nighttime observations into a narrative account. Engrossing us in the lives of resident mammals, insects and birds, he takes us on a dusk to dawn journey at each of the three altitudinal life-zones of the Yolla Bollys. The illustrations by Roger Bayless complement the narrative tales well. Like the writing, the black and white prints are sensitive and detailed. Although Wallace’s book lacks the eloquence and depth of the great naturalists like Thoreau and Muir, his work is interesting and enjoyable. He provides us with a perspective on a unique wilderness that few have explored. SABINE KREMP, Smithfield, Utah Everybody Gets Something Here. By Ken Mitchell. (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1977. 122 pages.) Ken Mitchell’s namesake, novelist W. O., has another career as racon­ teur. That spinning of yarns crops up in W. O.’s novels, often told by salty, rough-spoken narrators, as in his Jake And The Kid stories which ran as a successful radio series for years. That interest in both the teller and the tale surfaces in Everybody Gets Something Here. One of the fascinations of this collection is hearing the different voices and the characters behind them — from the narrator’s knowing ignorance in the title story through the mock-tough simplicity of “Great Big Boffs They Are” and the slightly nasty raciness of “A Contract Is A Contract” to the direct delight in the tone of “The Great Electrical Revolution” (the best story in the book). The emphasis is on the events and the way they work out, sometimes with a surprise ending, sometimes with ironic poetic justice, and on rare occasions with a sudden switch into seriousness, as in “A Time To Sow.” Mitchell’s world is full of rogues and vagabonds, most people in this world cheating others, deceitful, violent trapped inside social and familial situations they try to fight their way out by rough and tough methods that they express in their vocal brutalities and occasional expressive insights. There is also here the usual conflict between the city slicker and the country yokel, though often the city slicker is not as slick as he thinks he is, so the dominant tone of most stories is ironic. 258 Western American Literature Once in Mitchell’s world, however, the reader tends to grasp how the story will turn out, judging by the ironies established early on in the col­ lection. These stories often work as simple almost knockabout tales, but it’s the few which concentrate more on the characters and not on the ironic humor of narrative (like “Teachers,” “Luck” and “Give Me Your Answer, Do”) that stay in the mind longest. PETER STEVENS, University of Windsor, Ontario Jack London: No Mentor But Myself. Edited by Dale L. Walker. (Port Washington, New York: Kennikat, 1979. 197 pages, $15.00.) “In the main I am self educated,” wrote a twenty-four-year-old Jack London in 1900 to the publisher of his first book, The Son of the Wolf. [I] “have had no mentor but myself,” he continued, and briefly outlined his struggle to learn the “tricks” of the publishing business — of discovering just what editors wanted for their publications. Dale Walker has been a London devotee and scholar for almost thirty years, and what he has assembled in No Mentor But Myself is a remark­ able collection of Jack London’s thoughts on writing and writers them­ selves. There are articles and essays on the craft of writing, a selection of book reviews, including London’s praise for such classics as Frank Norris’ The Octopus, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, prefaces to books, and almost everything imaginable relevant to the subject of writing. This is a first-hand look at a writer’s honest and forthright opinions on his craft. W'e see London as a disciplined professional who seldom waited for inspiration...