Raven’s Exile: A Season on the Green River by Ellen Meloy (review)

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 asyou read Ellen Meloy’s portrait of the Green River and its canyons. In Desolation Canyon, where it can get so hot that one’s body feels “like melting lard,”where “one’s brain would fry”if it weren’t for the shade and comfort of cottonwood trees, where harsh light and searingwinds can tap yourveins, suckyou dry, and leave 222 WesternAmerican Literature you begging for the respite ofa summer evening, it ishard to deny the holiness ofwater. “Desolation lives in the continent’s dry heart. . Meloywrites. “. . . The River is its artery, my bloodstream, the capillaried branches of a riparian cottonwood tree, the splintered lightning ofsummer thunderstorms, the veins on the backs ofmyhands, full and blue asI hold the oars.” In asense ofplace narrative thatcombinesWendell Berry’sconviction,with naturalistAnn Zwinger’seyefor detail, and Chip Rawlins’searthy poetics, Ellen Meloy grabs the oars and rows us into the heart ofa river nomad’sview of the world. Like other biophiliacs who have found their niche running the rivers of the Colorado Plateau, Meloysavors the “aromatic river ofair curling above the water itself, a cool stony turbulent smell, the smell ofrapids.”In the windblown grit ofDesolation Canyon, she tastes the “fine-lined rock strata that resemble a gargantuan phyllodough pastryrobbed ofitsfilling.”Food metaphors through­ out the narrative will have river-running aficionados greasing up their Dutch-ovens and longing for the smell ofcedar smoke. Caution: long term exposure to the sensual delights ofriver travel maylead to a permanently altered sense of reality. Ellen Meloy’sdelightfully hallucino­ genic sense ofhumor suggests that she mayhave alreadycrossed that eddy line. But she keeps both oars in the water—telling tales of squawfish, Anasazi and Fremontghosts,John WesleyPowell, and desertbighorns—asshe rowsus down the river. She takes us beyond the holy lands of Desolation to witness the profane beauty of “Lake Foul”with Ken “Seldom Seen”Sleightand to seek out traces of nature believed to be hidden under the neon facades of Las Vegas. Thankfully, Ellen Meloy’sgraceful meanders into some of the troubling issues related to water use in the West always lead us back to the solace ofthe river. PETERANDERSON SaltLake City, Utah BoneGame. ByLouis Owens. (Norman: UniversityofOklahoma Press, 1994. 243 pages, $19.95.) In his third novel Louis Owens, the Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish Steinbeck and Indian literary scholar and...