Rereading Jack London ed. by Leonard Cassuto, Jeanne Campbell Reesman (review)

78 Western American Literature In Michaelson’s view, at the core of Clemens’s imagination is an “anxiety about the nature of the self.” As a consequence, Clemens resists consistency in characterization, narrative structure, genre, or indeed any boundary that imposes a restraining definition on the self. A pattern of escape and disruption is ever present in the plots of his works, in charac­ terization, and, at a meta-level, in his attitude toward his art and his audi­ ence. Of course, by defining Clemens’s imagination in this way, Michaelson invites the charge that he also is imposing a single vision on the author: a danger well-recognized by this self-aware and goodhumored critic. The weight of his case rests in Michaelson’s accumulation of the evidence: the many instances of disruption, resistance, and evasion by Clemens. Michaelson attempts a nearly comprehensive reading of MarkTwain’s career, from the “Map of Paris” and the infamous Whittier Birthday speech to the dream fragments of his last years. A strength of his method is that it allows him to illuminate Clemens’s less successful and often overlooked (or embarrassing) texts, such as The Prince and the Pauper, Joan ofArc, and Christian Science, and provides an avenue to explore the inconsistencies of his acknowledged successes. The conclusion of Huckleberry Finn (“The Evasion”), a mighty stumbling block for most critics, is the centerpiece of Michaelson’s analysis. The last few years have been flush times for Mark Twain scholars. Michaelson’s fresh, ambitious book is one of the best of the new era. CHARLES L. CROW Bowling Green State University Rereading Jack London. Edited by Leonard Cassuto and Jeanne Campbell Reesman. (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996. 288 pages, $45.00.) Rereading Jack London is a collection of essays edited by two repre­ sentatives of conservative London scholarship. It begins by disinterring Emerson to promote London as aparallel “representative man”rather than a bête noire holding eccentric “individual socialism” patterns of belief— a judgment given the seal of approval by Earle Labor in his “Afterword.” The collection contains thirteen essays of varying quality, four of which have recently appeared in major journals. Clarice Stasz’s essay on the neglected novel Adventure and Christopher Gair’smagisterial analysis of The Valley of the Moon are welcome, but unpublished conference papers by scholars such as Laurent Dauphin, Susan I. Gatti, and Susan Reviews 79 Nuernberg could also have been included. Despite editorial desire to give London eminent apolitical respectability, several stimulating essays undermine this ideological project. Robert Peluso’s essay on The People of the Abyss contains an inter­ esting reading of the work’s ideological complexities that should stimu­ late further debate, while Francis Schor’s treatment of The Iron Heel is a remarkable treatment of the novel’s intrinsic contradictory power, gender, and discursive features. Emphasis on history and politics characterize essays by Tanya Walsh and James Slagel on “Shin Bones” and “Koolau the Leper.” Finally, Lawrence Berkove’s examination of “The Red One” presents a more balanced assessment of a tale usually read in exclusively Jungian terms. Many of the articles presented in this work represent pioneering aspects of London scholarship and make this book worth exploring. TONY WILLIAMS Southern Illinois University at Carbondale Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy. Edited by Wade Hall and Rick Wallach. (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1995. 200 pages, $20.00.) A compilation of essays selected from the initial Cormac McCarthy Conference in 1993, this volume includes a number of important contri­ butions to the growing body of work about McCarthy’s writings. As do most collections from conference proceedings, however, it has some uneven spots. Of the eighteen essays following the book’s prefatory pages, many deal, at least briefly, with McCarthy’s western novels Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses. Yet only five pieces focus primarily on these two western writings. McCarthy’s third western novel, The Crossing (along with his southern-set drama, The Stonemason) was published in 1994, the year after the conference. It receives some attention in the preliminary pages, and a brief afterword is devoted to it and the play. Nonetheless, even the non-western...