Storied New Mexico: An Annotated Bibliography of Novels with New Mexico Settings by Tom Lewis (review)

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 humpbacked fluteplayer, this is one book which has its author’s voice in every line, her imprint upon each page, and her vision from cover to cover. BILL D. TOTH WesternNew Mexico University StoriedNew Mexico:An Annotated Bibliography ofNovels with New Mexico Settings. By Tom Lewis. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991. 224 pages, $45.00.) Even to perfunctory tourists, New Mexico is a land that cuts through the metal, tinted glass, and plastic of their Buicks and stirs the imagination, but if one ever doubted this state’s prominence as a setting for fiction, this book should put those doubts to rest once and for all. Sandwiched between its covers are 1,237 titles running the gamut from subliterary pulps to serious work. Rather than appraising each entry, Lewis, a Texas-based geologist, includes instead a brief—usually not more than thirty words—plot summary and other useful information such as the genre of each entry and, if possible, the year its 164 Western American Literature story takes place, as well as identifying mass-produced formulaic fluff and juvenalia. Equally useful are the appendices, which cross-reference each entry by title, theme, genre, place, and region. Then for lagniappe Lewis tosses in another 207 titles which he feels may marginally qualify as New Mexico fiction, as well as a list of references. Don’t be fooled by Lewis’s prefatory disclaimer that his work lacks “the academic polish of definitive scholarly bibliographies.” Granted, he leaves criticaljudgements to others, but believing this bit of self-deprecating rhetoric could cost you because this is indeed a valuable book. BILL D. TOTH Western New Mexico University PrairyErth (a deep map). By William Least Heat-Moon. (Boston: HoughtonMifflin , 1991. 624 pages, $24.95.) In PrairyErth, William Least Heat-Moon presents us with an encyclopedic dissection of Chase County, Kansas—flood, fire, fauna (bison to woodrat),flora (cottonwood to osage orange), history (both white and Indian), personalities, controversies (Chase County is the site of a proposed Prairie National Park), legends, architecture (even an interview with a limestone cutter), geology, paleontology, and geography. I was re-reading Carl Bredahl’s New Ground as I read PrairyErth. Least HeatMoon ’s book is a book of surfaces in Bredahl’s sense of the word. The author imposes a grid upon the land, then he starts at the northeast quadrant and proceeds down and across, like a methodical player of tic-tac-toe. He introduces each patch with excerpts from his “commonplace books,” writers past and present, prairie and otherwise that relate, at least obliquely, to the topics at hand: historical surveys, interviews...