The Heirs of Columbus by Gerald Vizenor (review)

180 WesternAmerican Literature flashiness of shooting them both at once to hit separate targets. In the Cassidy story, L’Amour used more of the typical Western genre terminology, such as “yeah” or “uh-huh” for “yes”, “git” for get, and leaving the “g” off the “ing” words. This issomething he didn’t do in his own novels. However, the story does reveal L’Amour’straditional use of true historical and geographical references. Though the Hopalong Cassidy books will never measure up to L’Amour’s later writing, they are stories that needed to be told. Louis L’Amour has become a legend of the Western genre, and Hopalong Cassidy is part ofthe birth ofthat legend. LEWISJ. DABB Smithfield, Utah The Heirs of Columbus. By Gerald Vizenor. (Hanover and London: Wesleyan/ University Press of New England, 1991. 189 pages, $18.95.) Readers of Gerald Vizenor know that his books are not so much books as they are ammunition in the metonymical arsenal with which he battles the absurdity of life in our time. Vizenor begins Heirs with a headnote from Jean Paul Sartre: “One does not redeem evil; one fights it.... We want [a book] to be explicitly conceived as aweapon in the struggle that men wage against evil.”The main evil in Vizenor’sworldview is the postmodernist genocide ofnative Ameri­ can cultures through “racialism, colonial duplicities, sentimental monogenism, and generic cultures.” To withstand this evil Vizenor invents a new breed of trickster: the Crossbloods, whose confrontations with absurdity are “comic and communal, rather than tragic and sacrificial.” Because these confrontations are humorous and imaginative, they are liberating. In Heirs, Vizenor’s protagonists are indeed a new breed. They are not only the descendants ofancient woodland tribes, but also of Christopher Columbus. In an outrageously tricksterish touch, Vizenor’s Columbus suffers from a curiously clubbed penis which causes him great pain on erection. (Dare we assume here that Western culture is victimized by its own manhood, that its superior strength is as well superior affliction?) Samana, a lovely trickster who has seen at least ten reincarnations, brings peace to Colum­ bus with “lust and wild rapture.”Columbus cannot escape her memory and can soothe his spiritual loss onlv with a lust for gold. And the battle between the material and the spiritual is begun on this continent for all time. But the magic irony is that the heirs of Columbus seek to calm rather than enrage. Stone Columbus, for instance, seeks to resist the evil that surrounds us by telling soothing stories on talk radio to the abandoned children of contem­ porary existence. Stone, much like Vizenor perhaps, feels that language “is the Reviews 181 trick”and that “humor is his only mission in the world.”Otherwise, he “dreams out of time.”And iflanguage and humor will liberate us from our time and will maintain a re-birthed ethnicity which is a vital life form rather than an anthro­ pological antique, Vizenor indeed will have battled absurdity to a standstill. DEXTER WESTRUM Ottawa University The Chinchilla Farm. ByJudith Freeman. (New York: Vintage, 1991. 308 pages, $9.95.) In William Ranney’s painting Boone’s First View of Kentucky, 1849, Daniel Boone peers into a West so immense that Ranney crops that westward side of the painting, making no attempt to depict that vast prospect of hope. The parents ofVerna Fields, narrator ofJudith Freeman’s novel The ChinchillaFarm, First met in Boone’s Kentucky while Mormon missionaries. Their Utah home is Verna’s birthplace, but with her husband Leon’s leaving her, Verna must look yet farther west for hope and comfort not unlike the troubled S. Levin in Bernard Malamud’sANew Life. She heads to Los Angeles. En route she picks up an L.A. native, Duluth Wing, who calls their destination “Elay,” making it “sound foreign, like a very exotic location.” It isn’t. She contacts her sister-inlaw , Inez Greenberg, only to learn that she wishes, with her retarded daughter Christobel by Carl, Verna’s dead brother, to escape the abuse ofJim, her third husband, and flee to Mexico. Hence the novel has three sections: Utah, Los Angeles, and Mexico. WhenJim, who shoots lemons offCalifornia trees for fun, follows...