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The Search For Temperance Moon by Douglas C. Jones (review)
- Western American Literature
- The Western Literature Association
- Volume 27, Number 2, Summer 1992
- pp. 172-173
- 10.1353/wal.1992.0137
- Review
- Additional Information
172 WesternAmerican Literature nia. Also, McCarthy does a nice job of invoking a sense of place—the cold, clammy north coast of the Golden State, a far cry from the beach culture of latter-day southern California myth. Against the backdrop of this setting is the main character, Anton Rostov, a lieutenantwith the Russian American Fur Company. In the mold ofthe conven tional frontiersman of fiction, he has a little trouble with authority but gets along well with the Aleuts, the Pomos, and the Spanish. He marries Mitana, a Pomo girl, and they have a son. After mother and son are killed by grizzlies, Anton wanders for ten years, living as a hunter in the wilds of northern California. Then he is reunited with Maria, daughter of a Spanish grandee, for his second marriage. There is a pleasant wish-fulfillment here for some readers: the dark nature girl to mingle with in one’s youth, and then the enlightened, civilized woman for one’s second chance in maturity. In his own life, Anton is able to integrate the three cultures—Russian, Indian, and Spanish—a success that contrasts with his country’s failure to maintain a foothold in America. Again, the reader can feel gratification: the individual succeeds, but Russia doesn’t get America. Generally, this is a readable and interesting book, presenting a lesserknown chapter ofAmerican history. Details of time and place hold the reader’s interest, as do, one might suppose, the obligatory quarrels, fistfights, brandish ing of knives, attacks by grizzlies, and the like, which punctuate the chapters of the genre. There are a few lapses in narrative point of view, a few small anachronisms, a few overused words, and an apparently unintentionally nega tive depiction of Mexicans, but overall it is one of McCarthy’s better produc tions. JOHN D. NESBITT Eastern Wyoming College TheSearchForTemperanceMoon. ByDouglas C.Jones. (NewYork: Henry Holt and Company, 1991. 324 pages, $22.50.) Outlaw Queen Temperance Moon has been shot dead over in the Indian Nations. Ambushed. Daughter Jewel Moon, Fort Smith bordello keeper, calls upon cocaine-addicted, defrocked lawman Oscar Schiller to find the murderer. Thus begins a border tale brimming with violence, betrayal and singular fron tier characters: Syrian Moses Masada, the rogue policeman; Delaware Indian Candy Redstripe, mysterious and deadly; Tish Redstripe, Candy’s Cherokee wife, beautiful and unyielding; enigmatic, displaced Creole Mulev LaRue; and an eclectic supporting cast. The action of this western/detective/historical novel crisscrosses the bor Reviews 173 der between Fort Smith and the Nations, articulating the contrasting surface values of the self-consciously lawful city and the irresolute Indian Territory. We expect relative morality and selective enforcement in the Nations, for it is the raw, mean-spirited land of the disenfranchised. The Removal had created artificial societies, had extinguished tribal cultures. SaysTish: “ ‘So much had to be left behind, and now it’s lost.’ ” Fort Smith, however, provides the hard-edged shadows where civilized and communal men may hide their treacheries. In blackness, they can shed civility and slip across the imaginary line of morality which overlays the border. This is, too, the story of two women who unwittingly challenge the distinc tion of demarcation. Temperance Moon was a renegade white woman, “a creature of the Nations,”who nurtured violence and could only perish from it; coming from the civilized side, she propogated lawlessness on both sides. Tish Redstripe is a citizen of the Nations but a creature of her own heritage; she comes from the lawless side but lends dignity to both. Finally, “twelve men good and true” must weigh the veracity of claims and denials from each side, must seek some small moment when the line between societies declares itself or disappears. Asusual, Douglas C.Jones holds firmly to a sixth sense ofpast moments and those who dwelled within those moments; they are rich with the eccentricities of the frontier and their own far-flung histories. And, as usual, his prose is as easily kept to as a smoothly striding saddle horse. The narrative moves quietly and effortlessly toward closure, seeks no resolution, settles for clarity. DAN WILSON University ofFlorida The VermilionParrot. By David Rains Wallace. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books...