The Earth Abideth by George Dell (review)

Reviews 59 Golden Days. By Carolyn See. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987. 196 pages, $15.95.) Carolyn See’s fourth novel is a wondrous, alchemical brew of feminist morality tale, raunchy comedy, and apocalypse. Its characters include a consciousness-raising guru, a woman TV evangelist, and an aging financier who forms a feminist bank. The narrator, Edith Langley, is a twice-divorced Los Angeles woman who returns from New York to remake her life as a selfstyled financial adviser. These are exactly the absurd, rootless folk despised and ridiculed by every pundit and satirist to visit Los Angeles. See celebrates them. “To my surprise it fell to me to tell our story,” the narrator remarks near the end of the novel, “—the pane of window glass as it jerked from its precarious moorings in our old home on the skyline of Topanga, the last seconds before the thick air come to sear our skins and change it forever.” Throughout the novel Edith pauses to remark on the nature of storytelling, on what makes a true story. We come to understand that she is telling us a story from after, when the oral tales are all that are left among the survivors of nuclear war who are trying to make sense of their lives. She does not know many stories about the men who ran the world before, “any stories that ring true, anyway.” She tells a story, instead, about “a race of hardy laughers, mystics, crazies, who knew their real homes, or had been drawn to this gold coast for years, and they lived through the destroying light, and on, into the Light ages.” Like Ursula K. LeGuin’srecent Always Coming Home, a Northern Cali­ fornia version of a post-industrial future, See imagines an emerging matri­ archy with shamanistic powers. When Edith tells her story to another group of survivors, sparks fly from her hands and grass burns around her feet. In con­ trast to north coast visionary thinking, however, See rejects the sentimental cult of Ishi: “We knew that the Indians who lived here were the last word in incompetence.” If “the city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself,” as Joan Didion remarked, thinking of The Day of the Locust, this novel is a major exploration of that image, and a surprising affirmation of Los Angeles and of human nature. CHARLES L. CROW Bowling Green State University The Earth Abideth. ByGeorge Dell. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986. 342 pages, $14.95.) This old-fashioned “farm family saga” has a curious history. Written in 1938 for an Atlantic Magazine contest, it made its way to the list of finalists and then disappeared from view until 1985, when Dell’s family brought it to 60 Western American Literature the Ohio State University Press. An English professor, Dell apparently wrote as many as ten (unpublished) novels. Dell seems to have wanted to write a novel which accurately reflected the German culture in the Ohio of his youth. The Earth Abideth thus has con­ siderable interest in character, situation and regional folklore and geography. Ranging from the close of the Civil War to 1917, it follows Thomas Linthorne from his courting days to his death, sporadically tracking his family through three generations. Three strands of the story are of particular interest. The first develops Linthorne’srelationship with a local bully, Gorm Schrader, and the strange resolution of that conflict. The second explores Linthorne’s romantic attraction to his neighbor’s wife and the community complications involving the child of that union. The third details the mystery and ultimate tragedy of Linthorne’srecalcitrant son. For all of its drama, fine character sketches, and detail of incident, how­ ever, Dell’s novel finally seems to lack resolution. It draws few conclusions about human nature and gives little sense of fictional purpose. Readers may want more connection between incident and consciousness—for example, be­ tween murder, motivation, and conscience; and because Linthorne’s affair with Lucile Brewster has dire consequences, we may wish to see more develop­ ment of emotional cause and effect. Perhaps this novel’s chief claim to our attention now is the quality of its nostalgia; books like...