Language in the Blood by Kent Nelson, and: The Middle of Nowhere by Kent Nelson (review)

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 in his home and eventually protecting her from her parents begins to dissolve his grief over his grandson’s death; and apparently Louise herself is on her way to emotional health through the agency of Phil’s gift of love. BARBARAALLEN Rock Springs, Wyoming Language in the Blood. By Kent Nelson. (Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, Peregrine Smith Books, 1991. 258 pages, S18.95.) The Middle ofNowhere. By Kent Xelson. (Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, Peregrine Smith Book’s, 1991. 208 pages, S18.95.) In need ofajob and a change of scenery after the breakup of his marriage, Scott Talmadge, the 31-year-old protagonist of Kent Nelson’s Language in the Reviews 183 Blood, leaves his native Massachusetts to become a temporary professor of ornithology at the University ofArizona. Like so many others who have crossed the country before him, Scott responds to the mythic allure of the West: “The horizon was rimmed with mesas and hills and mountains, powder blue and lavender and nameless, and I felt at last as though I was driving to a place I wanted to go. I was driving toward a country which gave weight to the few things I still believed in—birds, mainly, and the idea of dreams.”Language in theBlood is indeed a dreamy novel, a romantic’s must-read. Not only does it imbue the stark Sonoran landscape with a sort of dusty, sun-baked poetry, but it attempts to find a place in our world for such old-fashioned ideals as sacrifice, loyalty, and commitment. In Arizona, Scott meets up with several other dreamers—a cetologist, a writer, a dancer—who, like him, quietly refuse to conform. Like the birds that Scott traps in the nets he spreads throughout Madera Canyon, these sensitive, intelligent people often become enmeshed, caught up in symbolism of their own making. One of the novel’s most memorable scenes, for example, takes Scott and a lady friend on a mountain hike to bury the bone of a woman they didn’t even know. The person who orchestrates this grand gesture is Tilghman Myre, Scott’s buddy from their Harvard days, who has moved to Tucson before the novel begins. A charismatic, though persistently enigmatic, figure, he tran­ scends his posturing, however, with effective, heroic action. As Scott learns during a week of sun and booze in Mexico, Tilghman plays a vital role in the secret lifeline that smuggles Central American refugees across the U.S.-Mexican border. When, at the end of that same week, Scott finds himself at the wheel of a truck bound north for freedom, the novel kicks into high...