Sacred Violence: A Reader’s Companion to Cormac McCarthy ed. by Wade Hall, Rick Wallach (review)

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 material has bearings on the west­ ern novels. For one thing, as Nell Sullivan correctly states in her essay, “All his novels to date take place amid frontier conditions. .. .” In that and numerous other traits, each of the southern books shares acres of common ground with the Western ones, including a resistance to simplistic region­ al labeling. 80 Western American Literature Of the five essays centering on McCarthy’s western novels, Dianne C. Luce’s “ ‘When You Wake’: John Grady Cole’s Heroism in All the Pretty Horses” and Rick Wallach’s “Judge Holden: Blood Meridian's Evil Archon” are the strongest. Wallach occasionally fails to follow his own advice to “be wary of thejudge’s pronouncements,” and he forces an argu­ ment claiming it is significant that Judge Holden’s weight is “practically identical to the novel’s page count.” Nevertheless, both pieces are wellargued and provide interesting insights; whether or not one ultimately agrees with the interpretations, they merit consideration. The editors’ placement of the works cited for all essays at the vol­ ume’s end provides a more accessible list of sources than typical of com­ pilations. However, Wallach’s introduction fails to strongly contextualize the essays within McCarthy criticism; it just summarizes them. A minor annoyance is the volume’s several typographical and near-homonym errors. As most readers of McCarthy’s work and of the analysis of his work know, the depths of his fiction and drama have barely begun to be plumbed. As a whole, this collection takes McCarthy criticism a few leagues further beneath the surface. DAVID N. CREMEAN University ofWisconsin-Whitewater Savage Art: A Biography ofJim Thompson. By Robert Polito. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995. 543 pages, $30.00.) Robert Polito’s Savage Art is an excellent, long overdue biography of Jim Thompson. It undertakes a detailed excavation of a writer whose fic­ tional exploration of the dark side of the American Dream applies to our era as well as his. Polito interviewed key members of Thompson’s family who are now deceased and explored archive sources for his book. Polito understands Thompson’s work as “a rare instance of a popular art that is also personal and deeply subversive” containing fiction “fueled by a lurid intelligence that bulldozes distinctions between sensational and serious culture.” Books such as The Killer Inside Me, Savage Night, A Hell of a Woman...