Light by Seymour Epstein (review)

260 WesternAmerican Literature lacksjust the sort of detail which makes McKay’sworld so believable, and comes nowhere near autobiographical accounts of life in the camps. For example, Shige Fujishima, in OurRecollections (East BayJapanese for Action, 1983),writes: Topaz was in a big desert. . . . Men gathered tree roots and branches, polished them with sandpaper and made flower stands and other decorative things. From time to time, the internees held exhibits of handicrafts, awarding honors. Everybody endeavored to win the first place, and there was keen competition. Itwas the onlyjoy to give solace to the people’s desolate hearts. Fictional accounts of these historical moments of anguish can offer insight into the broader political and racist forces which created the camps. Despite its shortcomings, Erlich’s novel should be commended for taking on this difficult material, a sorry portion of our national heritage which merits significantly more artistic attention. HELENA WHALEN-BRIDGE LosAngeles, California Light. By Seymour Epstein. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1989. 282 pages, $18.95.) Like many writers of the west, novelist Seymour Epstein (a teacher of writing at the University of Denver for eighteen years) seems fascinated by a frontier, and he deftly portrays the men and women who struggle to settle it. Epstein’s frontier, however, is not the disappearing frontier of the American west. Rather, it is the omnipresent frontier of human relationships where the struggle is to find, as the narrator of Light puts it, “a workable vision of life” which often seems “nowhere in sight.” In hisworks, the focus ofthatstruggle varies. In SeptemberFaces, for example, the focus is a retired couple; in Leahit is awoman; in Lightitis a man. Each in his or her own way struggles with selfhood and with what George Light calls “serious things—love, marriage, children, the whole bloody ongoingness of the race.”In every case the reader is left understanding that the struggle is impera­ tive, that the outcomes are occasionally but not assuredly satisfying, and that this particular frontier can never be completely settled. George Light narrates his own struggle. After twenty-five years, his marriage to Ellen became troubled for reasons he still does not understand. After two years of separation, he is attempting to fathom “the man-woman thing”in order to achieve the reconciliation he desires. As he watches his daughter enter a relationship he believes harmful to her, he discovers that Ellen was harmed as Reviews 261 much or more by her relationship with him. Although he wants to believe there is “a betterwayfor men and women to be together”,he finds that there probably is not. “The reason,”he says, is “simple. Separate heads. The human condition.” No matter what we share, no matter what we tell each other, the “ultimate mystery of selfhood remains.” At one point, when asking a bookstore clerk for a book that might help explain reladonships between women and men, Light says he prefers nonfic­ tion because fiction “tends to obscure the matter.”That is certainly not the case with Epstein’sfiction. While the matter itselfmilitates against certitude, Epstein explores it lucidly and sheds light on it from which all of us on the frontier can benefit. TERENCE A. DALRYMPLE Angelo State University Mean Spirit. By Linda Hogan. (New York: Atheneum, 1990. 375 pages, $19.95.) The discovery of oil in Oklahoma in the 1920s proved a greater curse than a blessing to the many Indians who, thanks to this sudden stroke of “luck,” became rich overnight. According to Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw, this instant wealth not only set the Indians on a reckless and spiritless quest to acquire the white man’s symbols of status (big cars and houses, fine furniture and clothes), but it marked them as targets for his boundless capacity for greed. Backed by a legal system they manipulate for their own gain,John Hale andJess Gold, the villains of Hogan’s Mean Spirit, cheat, intimidate, and murder the Osage of Oklahoma in a vicious campaign to wrest their oil-rights away from them. The idea that the material comforts of white culture are destructive rather than redemptive is, by now, a staple of Native American literature. But Hogan, by telling the story...