An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field by Terry Tempest Williams (review)

220 WesternAmerican Literature Native American authors including D’Arcy McNickle, Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor,James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich. Reflecting the development of American Indian literary criticism, Fleck reprints several historically seminal contributions to the field authored by Priscilla Oaks, Charles Larson and Alan Velie, as well as an important contex­ tual world view essay contributed by Simon Ortiz. Included are many leading scholars such as Louis Owens, William Bevis,James Ruppert, Lawrence Evers, La Vonne Ruoff, Paula Gunn Allen, Gretchen Bataille, Linda Hogan, and Kathleen Sands. Despite the work of these many fine scholars, there is some unevenness across the spectrum ofcollected essays. Inclusion ofsomecompara­ tive criticism outside of Native America detracts from the theme of escaping Eurocentric bias and isalso outside the scope ofthis scholarship. In addressing specific authors, it is unfortunate that Fleck wasn’t more comprehensive in scope. Moreover, the selections chosen forJamesWelch solelyaddress Winterin theBlood and are all reprints, thereby ignoring his other significant and newer works. This criticism can in part be extended to the treatment of D’Arcy McNickle. Among the most exciting new criticism contributed to the volume is an essay byJanet St. Clair concerning mixed-blood women. Gretchen Bataille’s study of The Beet Queen should also be noted for its importance as a new contribution. By and large, Fleck has given us a significant contribution to the critical study of American Indian fiction and thereby advanced the liberation of the Native American worldviewfrom the dominant Eurocentric biases. JAYHANSFORD C. VEST Arizona State University West An UnspokenHunger:StoriesfromtheField. ByTerryTempestWilliams. (NewYork: Pantheon Books, 1994.147 pages, $21.00.) Dedicated readers ofTerryTempestWilliams’sworksmayrecognize allbut a couple of the eighteen short essays collected here from previous publication in journals, books, and magazines ranging from The Congressional Record to Outsideand Wilderness. Collated under the title An Unspoken Hunger, each essay contributes to a sustained articulation of desire—an extended explication of one woman’s urge to declare her sovereign identity and to detail its need for expression within regenerated structures ofhome, community, region, nation, and global ecology. As Williams weaves each narrative and vignette into the body ofthis little book, she attempts incorporation ofher multiple perspectives as a professional naturalist, anti-nuclear activist, Mormon woman, feminist, poet, and environmentalist into an explicit statement of an all-consuming Reviews 221 appetite for life itself—an overwhelming human hunger for community with one another and with the non-human world in which we live. Unfortunately, at least for this reader, Williams’s noble ambition remains unfulfilled. While certain essaysin this attractivelydesigned and marketed book shine with powerful passion and purpose, the whole has a disjointed feel. Several individual pieces are just too brief and too elliptical to accomplish anythingmore than abrushwith unexamined sentiment. Even more disturbing is Williams’s inattention to inherent contradictions within the multiplicity of hervaried perspectives: the complicityofMormonism in patriarchal capitalism, for instance; or the sexist, sometimes misogynist, tendencies of her sainted mentor Ed Abbey; or, yes, her eroticizing of the landscape in exclusively and unproblematized feminine terms. While certain ofWilliams’ssentiments and expressionswill surely draw the sympathies offeminists and the environmentally concerned, political situations are rarely so simple as Williams suggests. For example, in “Wild Card,” Williams’seffort to draw together the politics ofwomen’sissues, public health, and environment culminates in a conception of a sort of feminist bioregionalism to which she ascribes the term “home rule”—the very slogan presently deployed by “Wise Use”anti-environmentalists and anti-gun-control militia groups in the West that threaten to combine Sagebrush Rebellion rhetoric with real firepower. While we may know that Williams would in fact militate expressly against the politics of these groups, the confusion of bioregionalismwith populistextremism possible in her ownchosen term for an idealized vision ofectopic, domestic tranquillity should not entirely escape her or our critical scrutiny. Williams’s analyses are not necessarily inaccurate, just incomplete. While her often provocative, sometimes poetic prose coupled with the intensity and breadth ofher passionate commitmentwould promise an engaging feast, this is ultimately an unsatisfyingvolume. MARKSCHLENZ University ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara Raven’sExile:A Season ontheGreenRiver. ByEllen Meloy. (NewYork: Henry Holt, 1994. 256 pages, $22.50.) Youcan’thelp butfeel sun-scorched and slightlydelirious...