The Chinchilla Farm by Judith Freeman (review)

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 Inez, the suspenseful climax demonstrates the uncommon skill of this first-time novelist. This extraordinary book reveals the dreams ofothers besides Verna: for her family, two-and-a-half acres in the Utah foothills where “we imagined . . . the whole vast landscape was ours . . . but it never came that way”; for family friend Lawrence Bagley, developing a chinchilla farm to create wealth, a farm which novelist Freeman effectively uses to examine human relationships; and for Inez, her brother Lorenzo’s farm in San Ignacio which “is like an oasis in the middle of the desert.” Freeman’s Bobbie Ann Mason-like realism—“A dragon tattoo curled around one ofhis biceps”—and her Annie Dillard-like detail—“I remem­ bered the day the chinchillas escaped ... everything had appeared distinct... as ifIwere really seeingfox the first time”—invigorate her picaresque narrative with artful interleavings, associations, connections. The Chinchilla Farm is a literal journey, but more importantly for Verna, a Patsy Cline fan, it is a richly symbolicjourney from her athletic husband, Leon, a hypocritical mechanic and horsebreeder, to sensitive Vincent, a rich, thin, 182 WesternAmerican Literature thoughtful student of Franz Schubert. Incisive novelist Freeman reminds us all that we, simultaneously, “are both strange and familiar to ourselves.” I highly recommend this beautifully provocative book. BOBJ. FRYE Texas Christian University Setfor Life. ByJudith Freeman. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. 312 pages, $19.95.) Set in the Bear Lake Valley in southeastern Idaho, this story links the lives of two people through pure happenstance. One is Phil Doucet, a retired widower racked with grief over the death of his grandson and guilt that the boy’s heart, transplanted into Phil’s chest, has made him “set for life”in the doctor’swords. The other is Louise Matthews, a troubled and rebellious teenager, running away from a white supremacist family in northern Idaho. These two people do not meet until halfway through the book, and the twists ofplot that eventually bring them together are full of the improbabilities that sound too incredible for serious fiction. Although it has a western setting, SetForLifeis cut loose from any real sense ofplace or past; it is a story in which geography is an accident. As such, it stands in contrast to Freeman’s first novel, The Chinchilla Farm, which recounts a contemporary woman’s westwardjourney to find a new life and a new sense of self. Setfor Lifedeals instead with issues of human relationships to one another rather than to place or past. Among those issues, the chiefis the power oflove— the heart—to heal. By the end of the novel, Phil’s decision to help Louise by sheltering her...