Nueva Granada: Paul Horgan and the Southwest by Robert Franklin Gish (review)

Reviews 187 conceived graduate thesis that proves the scholar’s fam iliarity with the stan­ dard literary and critical works without contributing significant new interpre­ tation of Carver’s fiction. Introducing the study, N esset places Carver in the tradition of Hemingway, Anderson, O’Hara, Cheever, Kafka, Turgenev, and Chekov, claim ing for Carver’s fiction a moral center w hile it explores the disenchantments of post­ modern humanity. Chapter One, “ ‘This Word L ove’: Sexual Politics and Silence in Will You P lease Be Quiet, P lease ?” explores particularly the force o f love and the issue of the lim itations of language as they appear in Carver’s first volum e of fiction. Characters find that love com plicates and dominates their lives, often com ­ pelling them to engage in sexual politics that further encumber them and lead them to ineffectual use of language or to silence. Even so, these characters usu­ ally continue their struggles rather than surrender to them. In the second chapter, “The Power o f Style in What We Talk A bout When We Talk About L ove,” N esset responds to the labeling of Carver as a m inimal­ ist w hile claim ing that Carver consistently “affords his characters liberty to act as they might . . . in a fictive universe . . . fundamentally lacking in individual freedom s.” N esset calls Carver’s style hyperextended realism and his treatment sympathetic. “Insularity and Self-Enlargem ent in C athedral” explores the stories that suggest the ability of man to insulate him self or to expand outward through gained awareness o f self. N esset focuses upon sym bols and metaphors Carver em ploys both as thematic matter and signature in the stories critics have called “affirm ative.” “ ‘Things Clearly Within My Pow er’: Communication and Control in the Last Stories” claim s that Carver renewed his original interest in characters who “struggle, mainly unsuccessfully, to comprehend the bleak realities o f their liv es,” and who “not only recognize freedom but typically articulate their recognitions, even if only to vent dismay at how im possible such freedom seem s in relation to their lives.” N esset states that these last stories are “more com prehensive, fuller rhetorically and thematically, while at the same time lighter in tone than the earlier work.” Characters persist, som etim es moving toward a crossroads, a better life, helped along by a degree of hope. DELORES W ASHBURN Hardin-Simmons U niversity Nueva Granada: Paul Horgan and the Southwest. By Robert Franklin Gish. (C ollege Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1995. 139 pages, $22.50.) Number Two in the Tarleton State University Southwestern Studies in the Humanities, Nueva Granada is a collection of eight essays on Paul Horgan and 188 Western American Literature two interviews with Robert Gish. The essays are reprints and revisions of papers which have previously appeared in scholarly journals over a period of some fourteen years (1979-1993). One interview is printed here for the first time. The essays address different aspects of Horgan as a writer of short fiction, novels, and historical-biographical works over more than fifty years. Each essay is com plete in itself, presenting a different dimension of a “remarkable but unfortunately neglected talent,” in the words of Lawrence Clayton. Several concentrate on his evocation of the Southwest, others on his historical writings with an emphasis on his comprehensive approach to presenting history, similar to the “omnidirectional history of Parkman.” Given his lengthy career and the number of his publications, this collection underlines the thematic unity that characterizes Horgan’s work— in Anaya’s words, the “magic realism of place.” Like W illa Cather, Horgan never fails to project the dynamics of the interaction between the character and his space, or as Gish phrases it, Horgan’s sympathy for “humanity and the places of its liv ­ ing.” M exico Bay, W hitewater, The Common H eart evoke powerfully this sense of people, place, and time. M ost of the essays, in one way or another, and parts of the two interviews address the theme of Horgan as a regionalist writer, a label Horgan him self does not seem to find particularly endearing— a non...