Maps to Anywhere by Bernard Cooper (review)

286 WesternAmerican Literature the volume’s best offerings in “The Day It Rained Blood,”—prove that the newness, the vitality in such a historic state continues to resonate into the current decade. All in all, there’s an elan in these stories not too different from the feeling, the luck of drawing a class of the best writers in the school—a feeling which all writing instructors know and relish. And here, Anaya as editor, and the reader, simply have to sit back and bask in the pleasure of the pages as the enchantment, the inspiration, the fulfillment and the promise of New Mexico as a very special place for artists of all kinds is once again confirmed. ROBERT F. GISH CalPoly State University Maps to Anywhere. By Bernard Cooper. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990. 139 pages, $19.95.) Apparently a collection of short essays and meditations (most published earlier), Bernard Cooper’s Maps to Anywhere may be read as a post-modernist artist’s autobiography. The fragments circle key moments and themes linking present and past; they reveal a thoughtful and troubled writer and the boy he was, who grew up in the shape-changing, trickster city, Los Angeles. He learned the power of words there, and tried to construct in his mind a perfect world as defense against change and loss. The boy Bernard played with his Plasticville toy city, visited open houses in new development tracts and the pathetically optimistic “Home of the Future”in Disneyland, and studied books on modern architecture. In another room his older brother, once a glamorous athlete, died of leukemia. The images of real and imagined houses which fill the book might be used by a literary tourist like Nathanael West or Evelyn Waugh for satire ofLosAngeles’s excess, but here are treated as part of a normal California childhood. They are given painful rel­ evance, however, by the failure of sunlight, clean swimming pools, and the bright California future to save his brother. Such are the issues troubling Bernard still, as he visits his now twice-divorced, quixotic father in the house which is still, and is not, the home he knew as a boy. This is a rich, fugue-like book, which has some distant kinship with Marc Norman’s novel Bike Biding in Los Angeles, another insider’s reflections on growing up in the city. CHARLES L. CROW Bowling Green State University ...