Good-bye, Son and Other Stories by Janet Lewis (review)

Reviews 57 a teleplay from the Western Writers of America. Ranging from pulp magazinestyle adventures to folk traditions and fantasy, these tales are most diverting when exploring unfamiliar literary territory. Resolutely traditional are Jeff Banks’s“Making Money in Western Bank­ ing” and Elmer Kelton’s “A Bad Cow Market.” The former, with its bandit who plans one last big bank stick-up before retirement, iseffective only because of its O. Henry-type climactic twist. The latter introduces the commonplace theme of the superiority of rural life over urban, as an impoverished rancher contemplates moving to San Antonio. More compelling is the excellent “Night of the Cougar,” by Ardath Mayhar, in which an almost supernatural beast stalks a backwoods woman with two young children. Equally haunting is Neal Barrett’s “Sallie C” with its strange desert hotel, kept by Pat Garrett, the man who shot Billy the Kid, and peopled with stranger inmates: Orville and Wilbur Wright; eleven-year-old Erwin Rommel, the future German field marshal; and the Kid himself, not dead at all but helplessly paralyzed by Garrett’sbullet. Hackneyed dialogue and stereotyped characters mar William F. Nolan’s “The Night Hawk Rides,” a teleplay about a Zorro clone protecting ranchers from wicked Mexicans in early Texas. It isnovel only in form. Brian Garfield’s “At Yuma Crossing” is vastly superior in artistry and psychological depth. The desert junction of the Gila and Colorado Rivers pro­ vides the setting for a wandering loner, a “Gringo,” in his encounter with a Yaqui girl, an aged woman, and a dying don, and his coming to terms with loneliness, the necessity of commitment, and the need to get across the river. Suspenseful and crisply narrated, this story, with two or three others in this anthology, is well described as “the best of the West.” KENNETH W. SCOTT Long Island University Good-bye, Son and Other Stories. By Janet Lewis. (Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1986. 221 pages, $19.95/$8.95.) The careful detailing of natural surroundings in most of Janet Lewis’s stories seems, at first, superfluous—a time-tried and predictable way of setting a tale. Indeed, there are times when the author’sworkmanlike crafting encour­ ages an overawareness of her labors and hinders a reader’s spontaneous re­ sponse. Yet, when one reflects upon a just-read story, these descriptions of external nature resurface and linger with new meanings, inextricably bound with the characters’experiences with life, death, and sorrow. In “People Don’t Want Us,” for instance, “The winter rains had, as usual, surrounded the small, unpainted house with a quarter acre of black adobe mud . . .the big field in which the strawberries used to grow had been let go to weed. The Yoshides were not at home” (107). Although nature here is not a direct 58 Western American Literature reflection of the human condition, it does foreshadow the impending reloca­ tion of a California-Japanese family during World War II. Most significantly, however, Lewis presents a harmonious, if not always symbiotic, co-existence between human nature and larger nature, enabling both characters and readers to accept death as a part of life’s natural cycle. In these stories she gently reminds us that death isan unavoidable, inescapable part of life and that neither nature nor death must be blamed for one’ssorrow. At first, the stories seem little more than vignettes, glimpses of life and death. With her spare, slow-paced, detached style, Lewis seems to skirt the surface of her characters’lives. Then, suddenly, she thrusts us into the essence of a situation, startling us out of the role of complacent observer and into that of active participant. This steady movement and these brief revelations work together to give the stories a collective meaning. DEANNA L. KERN LUDWIN Fort Collins, Colorado The News of the World. By Ron Carlson. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987. 187 pages, $15.95.) Carlson’s stories are so totally wonderful that when I finished them I was mad, mad, mad, like a three-year-old whose handful of M & Ms has dis­ appeared: “More stories. More!” Flaws? Well, the narrativevoice in “Madame Zelena Finally Comes Clean” sounds identical...