Songs of the Fluteplayer: Seasons of Life in the Southwest by Sharman Apt Russell (review)

162 WesternAmerican Literature Garrison too is split—so bicultural he can ride around with cop friends in a Mexican highway patrol car on weekends, chasing drunks, and pass for Mexi­ can. Like Aztecs, he too practices augury, with all the world as text for Garrison’s divinations. These essays examine the literal texts ofAztec histories, nineteenthcentury newspaper accounts ofrailroad tunnelling, Todorov, and Homer, while pursuing with equal vigor the more difficult signals of inanimate objects: the shriner’sfez Garrison’sMexican-hating father wore in his casket, the hydroelec­ tric dams of the American West that will eventually “look every bit as religious as all those pyramids . . . south of here,” the land itself. Ym-yang, however, a term from the other hemisphere, provides a more accurate expression for the binaries (a word he is fond of) that Garrison explores. The settings for the essays alternate across several thousand miles of intermontane North America, dividing equally between the author’s home in a Cascade valley of central Washington and the heart of Mexico. Yet each place evokes the other at some point in the essay, as the dark yin, in the Buddhist symbol, always contains the white dot of yang. “He always seemed a blurred series of transitions,” Garrison writes of his father. So too these essays, blurring the dualities they pose. So these borders that demarcate what we call the countries of North America as well. In Juarez, he cannot tell from which side of the border the fireworks commemorating Mexican Independence Day are rising; back “home” in Washington he knows the Grand Coulee Dam backs water up into Canada. And running through the essays, one of many motifs that draw them together—Coyote, the blurry, trans­ formational figure of a million stories, “in hundreds of different languages, thousands of different names”—still a strong but shifty presence throughout all of western North America and, these essays demonstrate, its culture as well. This winner of the 1991 Associated Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction presents further evidence of the renaissance the essay is enjoying as a form in late twentieth-century literature. JAMES McKENZIE University ofNorthDakota Songs of the Fluteplayer: Seasons ofLife in the Southwest. By Sharman Apt Russell. (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1991. 160 pages, $18.95.) Perhaps the best way to judge the health of any body of contemporary literature is to examine its emerging writers. Western literature is no exception, and fortunately the quality and quantity of this genre’s new voices provide clear testimony to its diversity and vitality. One of these new voices belongs to Sharman Apt Russell, and with Songs of Reviews 163 the Fluteplayer her entry into western letters is an impressive one. Indeed, this collection of nine essays does for New Mexico and the Mimbres River what Annie Dillard did for rural Virginia and Tinker Creek. And like Dillard, Russell is a first-rate essayist providing more evidence that the personal essay—at least in the West—is alive and well. And this is a personal book. In “Homebirth” Russell details the midwifeassisted births of her two children thirty miles from Silver City and the nearest hospital. “Songs of the Fluteplayer,” among other things, describes in clinical detail the final flight ofthe father she never knew who dies in the Mojave Desert after guiding the X-2 rocket plane to a speed record. While Russell’spersonal vision never leaves the book, this is not an exercise in autobiography or egotism. The real heart of Songs of the Fluteplayer is the Southwest itself—the people, cultures, and landscape of New Mexico—all so closely identified with the titular fluteplayer, the shadowy Kokopelli, who threads his way through much of the book. Since Russell makes her home in the Mimbres River Valley, much of the book derives from her experiences there. From the mojadoswho help the author and her husband finish their adobe to the conflicts between ranchers and environmentalists and from the trading posts of the past to a biosphere of the future, Russell’s essays explore variously what is at the center of southwestern life and culture. But whether the subject is the ecological and geographical features of the area, or the numinous...