The Sharpest Sight by Louis Owens (review)

Reviews 255 to task. In David’s tone as narrator, one hears echoes of True Grit, and the boybecoming -a-man theme is nicely handled. Unfortunately, too many characters make the action hard to follow, and the story doesn’t really take off until twothirds of the way through when David is left alone to fend for himself in the wilderness; at that point, the tale becomes quite absorbing. All in all, Sudden Country is a readable but generally forgettable book, although that is common in popular Westerns and not altogether a bad thing: one can put the book away for a year and then re-read it as if it’s new—a kind of literary recycling. It’s probably best to wait for the paperback of this one. CANDY KLASCHUS University ofHartford The Sharpest Sight. By Louis Owens. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. 263 pages, $19.95.) On the most superficial level, Louis Owens’s The Sharpest Sightis an exciting “whodunit” with plenty of suspense, suspects, and sex. The victim, a mixedblood Vietnam vet, has been murdered after his escape from a state hospital, where he had been imprisoned for killing his girlfriend. As in most murder mysteries, the investigator of the crime—in this case Mundo Morales, the Chicano deputy sheriff of a small town in California—serves as the novel’s center of consciousness. But in what potboiler would one find such an original character as Owens’s Uncle Luther? Living in a murky Mississippi swamp, this old Choctaw survivor is as steeped in Herman Melville as in tribal medicine. His eclectic wisdom holds the key to eternal rest for the spirit of the murder victim. Another unusual character is Jessard Deal, a sinister tavern-keeper who serves up demented insights on Matthew Arnold and Jonathan Edwards along with his beer; he says things like: “I believe that we are all essentially and fundamentally evil. But we are born innocent of our full potential. We must grow into our evil, you see.” Clearly it’s not realistic characters, or even realism itself, that Owens is after. Magical realism would be closer to the mark, with animated shadows, ghosts, a mysterious panther, and a witchy woman all given important roles in this strange, hallucinatory novel. To the FBI agents who pay a visit to Uncle Luther’s home in the swamp, such magic is disconcerting, fright­ ening. They come nowhere close to fathoming what the non-whites in the novel seem to grasp innately: to heal the emotional wounds opened by inexplicable acts of violence, one must not run from magic, but interpret its meaning, learn from it, ally oneself with the good and resist the bad. Obviously Owens has something weightier and more literary in mind than the churning out of formula fiction. Very true, he is guilty at times of introduc­ ing his metaphysical themes (the Manichean clash between good and evil, the 256 Western American Literature individual’s search for identity, regeneration through violence) with a heavy hand. Yet so is Melville, a writer with whom Owens ultimately shares a deeper kinship than with, say, Tony Hillerman. By choosing The Sharpest Sight as the first volume in its American Indian literature and critical studies series, the University of Oklahoma Press has raised the hope that this series will thrive on being unconventional and taking risks. PAUL HADELLA Southern Oregon State College CowboysAreMy Weakness. By Pam Houston. (New York: Norton, 1992. 171 pages, $25.99/$19.95.) If cowboys are not your weakness, you may not like Pam Houston’s book. Her cowboys are the virile, independent men to whom some women are strongly attracted, despite the often brutal or ambivalent attitude these men hold toward women. Houston’s stories illustrate the adventure found in relationships with these men who carry women with them as they live on the edge as hunters, whitewater rafters, and, of course, cowboys. Consequently, the excitement is not so much in the men themselves as in the way they live, an enticing existence that heightens sensual awareness. However, the characters that are most interesting are not the men, but the women who seek them. Houston’sfemales all enter their...