In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviews Continental Drift. By James D. Houston. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978. 337 pages, $8.95.) Continental Drift confirms James D. Houston’s importance as a western American novelist. This tight, tense story of subtle yet insistent strains within one family mirrors contemporary America: it is as much about us as it is about Montrose Doyle, the local newspaper columnist who lives with his wife on a small farm in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains. While Houston sets his tale in that particularly mysterious area of the Pacific coast, it reverberates well beyond its locale. But it must be acknowl­ edged first of all that the author evokes his local region very well indeed, its beauty, its faddists, its unstable geology. The novel opens with these lines: From high above, say gazing down from one of our tracking stations, he can see it plain as an incision some careless surgeon stitched up across the surface of the earth. It marks the line where two great slabs of the earth’s crust meet and grind together. Most of North America occupies one of these slabs. Most of the Pacific Ocean floats on the other. A small lip of the Pacific slab extends above the surface, along America’s western coastline, a lush and mountainous belt of land not as much a part of the rest of the continent as it is the most visible piece of that slab of crust which lies submerged. The line where these two slabs, or plates, meet is called the San Andreas Fault, (p. 3) The fault seems a perfect metaphor for the emotional chaos of a decade ago, just as it seems appropriate for the Doyle family itself. As the novel opens, Monty is awaiting the return of his younger son, Travis, from Viet Nam. Also anticipating Travis’s return are Leona, Monty’s wife, and Grover, their older laid-back son. The story quickly moves into a series of shocks similar to events that actually occurred in the Santa Cruz Mountains not long ago, bodies discovered and growing panic among residents. There is also circumstantial evidence that Travis may be involved in the killings. Houston resolves the tangle of events swiftly — perhaps too swiftly— and creates some marvelous scenes in the process. He also manages to prolong suspense with great narrative skill, while at the same time revealing the frayed seams of the Doyle family and of our society, in the bargain, avoiding clichés all the while. 218 Western American Literature It is a continuing index of Houston’s growth as a fictionalist that he achieves universality by writing so intensely and well of a particular region. It is also important to note that Houston is one of a number of gifted contemporary writers who are expanding the vistas of western American literature (although it appears that few critics have understood this). His characters are westerners in the West, and in this novel, as in his earlier A Native Son of the Golden West (1971), at least one character has been involved in westering: Leona Doyle is a product of the so-called Dust Bowl migration to California. Houston is much concerned with what the western movement has meant and means, but he is too contemporary a writer to concern himself with traditional subjects of classic western writing. In his work western value systems are tested against today’s dilemmas. While Continental Drift is probably not “the ultimate California novel” that one reviewer suggested, it is an interesting, important work by a writer who may indeed provide that ultimate before he cashes in. GERALD HASLAM, Sonoma State University So Sweet to Labor: Rural Women in America, 1865-1895. By Norton Juster. (New York: Viking, 1979. 293 pages, $16.95.) Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-1880. By Julie Roy Jeffrey. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979. 240 pages, index, $5.95.) “Bom an’ scrubbed, suffered and died.” That’s all you need to say, elder. Jes’ say, “born ’n worked t’ death”; That fits it — save your breath. Fortunately, not everyone has followed this advice on what should be said of women on the frontier. Although their lives were hard ones...

pdf

Share