Relative Distances by Victoria Jenkins (review)

170 WesternAmerican Literature November 1948. By Carl Dawson. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991. 176 pages, $17.95.) In 1948 Carl Dawson, who is currently professor ofEnglish at the University of Delaware, Newark, moved with his family from a rural Yorkshire village in England to sunny Los Angeles, there to start a new life. What follows, in this personal memoir, is a sort of Portrait oftheArtist as a YoungMan as Carl Dawson describes a single, pivotal year in his life and his family’s life. “In the New World,” he writes, “people waited for rain. Every day the sun shone with the same intensity. ... At recess we played a game called basketball. . . . Instead of drinking water from a shared iron cup, always chained to the tap, we had the luxury ofwater fountains.”There were other, less pleasant changes. His father, whom he had previously seen “wearing suits orjackets,”was now attired in the garb ofan engineer, “in loose overalls, with a thick blue shirt, and a pair ofshoes that must have been Uncle George’s because they made his feet large and ungainly.” Life in America was not altogether pleasant for this new immigrant family, and through these pages we see their struggles with alienation, dislocation and adversity. One of the low points is reached as a couple of union thugs rough up Dawson’sfather as the then small boy looks on: “One of the men hit my father, not hard, with his open hand, telling him they didn’t have all night. .. .Without membership, they said, he would not be so lucky next time.” Somehow the family endures. November 1948 is an unflinching portrait of a family and a land; it was written out of love for both, and Dawson is to be commended for his honesty and insight. JOHN A. MURRAY University ofAlaska, Fairbanks Relative Distances. By VictoriaJenkins. (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1990. 144 pages, $15.95.) Forget the luxury of easing into a novel, of getting to know characters through polite introductions. The pace of Relative Distances, like that of the Wyoming ranchers’ lives upon whom its. characters are based, is much too fast for those formalities. VictoriaJenkins, in her debut novel, plunks readers down in the middle of a place and of lives and seems to assume, in typical western fashion, that if you really want to know who’s who and what’s going on you’ll keep your eyes open and stick around long enough to find out. There are plenty of reasons to stick with this novel. The spirit and drive of Myra, the 36-year-old ex-miner, ex-hotel operator, and mostly ex-mother whose Reviews 171 life is reconstructed as the book progresses, infuse the work with an irresistible, if reckless, energy. The loss of body parts is a theme, at once disturbing and strangely fascinating. And I found the perspective offered here on the roles of women and men in the modern West, and on the consequences ofstepping out of those roles, gripping in its honesty. Honesty is the strong point ofJenkins’ book. Whether describing cattle drives, incest, fence mending, or family disputes, the author’s sensitivity to detail makes the writing ring true. And the despair that can accompany ranch­ ing comes through loud and clear. In fact, Jenkins has caught so well the essence of ranching’s negative aspects that one ex-ranch hand from Wyoming, with whom I shared the book, said that it was almost too painfully accurate to read. But that type of “honesty” also creates the one stumbling block I found in RelativeDistances. At times the author’s attempt to present ranching and ranch­ ers without the sugar coating given them in several recent books leads to an honesty that seems intentionally rawboned. It is a selective honesty, too, tending to dwell on negative aspects of a land-based occupation and to ignore positive influences that the land can have on those humans who spend their lives working it. Still, neither the ranch hand nor I could put the book down once we’d read the first page. That’s the kind of effect that most authors only dream of having...