The Living by Annie Dillard (review)

56 WesternAmerican Literature dated 1974, and first appeared in the California Quarterly in 1977. At the suggestion of Raymond Carver, it was published in The Pushcart Prize III the following year. I don’t know where else it has appeared, but it is a story which ought to endure, and it is good to see it in such fine attire. Of the aborted novels, he says, “only the two which I still think of as living are included here.”One of them is the omnipresent “Muddy Fork.’’Here, in the voice of Sonny Sughrue, we are in a shadow world to the “Prologue” of The Canterbury Tales, or to The Prelude, with its corresponding breezes, redundant, vexing creation. Here, too, there are memories and invocations to the past; but there are no blessings and fewjoys. Will he ever complete the work? He doesn’t say. If he does, though, if he can maintain the level he sets in this selection, he will then produce a masterpiece. The other novel fragment, “The Mexican Tree Duck,” also features Sughrue, the detective introduced in TheLast Good Kiss. As published here, the style is stilted and mildly parodic of his earlier work. Its opening reprises the themes of generational loss and duplicity, offalse reconciliation and desire, that served so powerfully in his earlier works. He reports that he is almost finished with the final draft and that it no longer tells of lost ladies. “It’s about laughter, love, and betrayal.” Had it been authored by a lesser talent, The Muddy Fork & Other Things would offer a fleeting, garrulous pleasure—of a sort provided by wizened barroom sages anywhere in the land. And for that reason alone, it is certainly worth the modest price. But Crumley has proven he can do magnificent things with words. This volume, in spite of its elegance and good will, falls short of Crumley’sown standard, and almost threatens to casta lightpall over his career. If it turns out to be the last weighty volume he ever produces, then it will doubtless be judged as the monument to his decline rather than, as we must now hope, a winter’s rest along the way. JOHN KOONTZ Drew University The Living. By Annie Dillard. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992. 397 pages, $22.50.) The Living is, without doubt, one of the two or three books with which Annie Dillard’s name will automatically be associated long into the future; it is, both stylistically and intellectually, the culmination of everything that she has done before. Long-awaited by her admirers, this novel of the pioneer era in Washington State places her immediately at the forefront of contemporary American novelists. It belongs on the same shelfwith such recent works of large fictive ambition as Dexter’s Paris Trout, Helprin’s A Soldier of the Great War, Essay Reviews 57 McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, and Morrison’s Beloved. Dillard has two thematic preoccupations in TheLiving: the problem of evil and the implications death has for life. The problem of evil is, for Dillard, a central moral and metaphysical concern of existence, and death is that defining particular, that keystone, of our experience in this world. We might say that death and its attendant pain are what make the problem of evil something of more than hypothetical interest. The sheer, brute, ineffable fact of even the most mild of deaths gives life a hard certainty. To Dillard, death means physical pain (as in that of the Skagityouth found, near death, in the Cascade Mountains by the boyJohn Ireland Sharp and the surveying party he is accompanying: this young Indian’s vision quest has ended with his being run through by a sharp­ ened stake, set into the ground by his Thompson Indian foes). But more significantly, death means, as Whitman likewise observed, emo­ tional and spiritual pain for “the living.” This psychic anguish is felt by those who feel lacerated by the loss of others (like Ada Fishburn, who, on the wagon journey west has seen her three-year-old son die an absurd but awful death: “Charley fell out of the wagon and their own wheels ran...