Unlocking the Air and Other Stories by Ursula K. Le Guin (review)

Reviews 85 episode. As well as being involved with the Camposes, Clay places him­ self under the wing of a kindly older trapper who has an Indian wife. He learns to let go of past resentments that consume him. Gradually he jetti­ sons his anger, overcomes what racial reservations he has, and accepts what today we call multi-cultural values. Gradually he allows himself to love Lupita. He understands that a regard for her family and their values must underlie his love. As she says, “You respect me. Actually, you respect all of us, my family, and that’s important.” Increasingly sensitive and human, Clay Westbrook is very much a hero for our time. With the resolution of the plot’s first strand, the second can work itself out. Now emotionally anchored, Clay is ready to deal with those who hassle him and wish to steal his land. He shows himself as prudent in combat as in love. Even traditional Western violence is subdued in Twin Rivers. No one shoots anyone, and the fist fights that do occur are left inconclusive: Clay half-beats one of his antagonists and fights the other to a draw. Only the fatalistic Tony, with his lower boiling point, beats his opponent outright. When at the end the chief heavy shows up spoiling for revenge, it is a measure of Clay’s moral growth that he refuses to fight him again. The story closes with Clay no longer holding grudges against anyone, at peace in the land he loves. Even minor characters, such as the cowboys of the Cross Pole outfit to which Clay belongs, come across as individuals. Only the two “pil­ grims,” mouthing tourist platitudes and jokes (they want, inevitably, to see “les Tetons"), are cardboard: parodies of Easterners, false notes in a book that generally rings true. The narrative informs as it entertains: here a disquisition on the importance of buckets in homesteading, there one on the grim reality behind “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie.” If Nesbitt sometimes insists too much, the moral tale he tells offers its quiet rewards. JOHN CLUBBE University of Kentucky Unlocking the Air and Other Stories. By Ursula K. Le Guin. (New York: HarperCollins, 1996. 207 pages, $31.00/$22.00.) In Unlocking the Air and Other Stories, Le Guin demonstrates her sensitive and intimate relationship with the English language and her capacity to bring out the beauty of words and the human experience they describe. She admits that though the stories “talk about reality . . . reali­ ty is a slippery fish that often can be caught only in a net of spells,” so she 86 Western American Literature weaves together in this collection of short stories the power of suggestion, ambiguity, and poignant insight to explore “the mysteries of name and time and ordinary living and ordinary pain.” “Half Past Four” reminds us that people with the same name exist all over the world and yet have their own stories to tell. Not until the third vignette of eight does the reader realize the narratives have nothing to do with each other even though they all talk about Ann, Ella, Stephen, and Todd. In “The Spoons in the Basement,” Le Guin explores the mystery of time by explaining that one of the previous tenants of Georgia’s house, “leaving for the holidays in June of 1910 or for a year abroad in September of 1951,” accidently left six apostle spoons. In “Daddy’s Big Girl” Le Guin studies ordinary living from a most unconventional per­ spective, that of the sister of a young girl who never ceases to grow in height even after she reaches a stature of forty-five feet at the age of fif­ teen. “Olders” tells the story of a farm wife who must confront not just the death of her husband but his planting as well, for in his dying he metamorphosizes into a tree. After his skin browns and grains, he is stood upright in a bucket of water to sprout roots until he can be planted in the Old Grove with his ancestors. Le Guin wonders if there was cruelty in his not dying. At the end of “Half...