Cloudy in the West by Elmer Kelton (review)

Reviews 303 her beautiful achievement to keep ‘place’ in its proper place, while reflecting its values and powers in her creatures, as they came alive under her general vision and empathy for life at large.” Anastasia Hobbet has a gift of similar proportions, and her first novel is striking for its courage and humane art. C. L. R a w lin s B ou ld er, W yom ing Cloudy in the West. By Elmer Kelton. (New York: Forge, 1997. 255 pages, $21.95.) Although Elmer Kelton prefers to set his fiction in times of major change, such as the removal of Texas Indians and the closing of the open range, he has long since touched upon all such periods from the Texas Revolution to the 1980s land-use strife. So now he must find other ways to be distinctive in order to avoid predictability. In this novel, he introduces a new thirteen-year-old protagonist, who, through his naivete, tells far more than he knows, much as Huck Finn exposes the South. Joey Shipman seems like Huck as he looks to prudent Reuben, a former slave, for advice, and then remem­ bers Reuben’s aphorisms even after the former slave is murdered. In terms of speaking regional dialect and of questioning human nature, Joey reminds us of Twain’s lovable social misfit. Thematically, though, Joey Shipman departs from Huck, and this indicates an over­ looked shift in Kelton’s fiction. For years, Kelton has used resistance-to-change as his key theme, Charlie Flagg of The Time It Never Rained being its prime example, but another theme—the code of decency—had subtly developed. As he acknowledges in my December 1994 interview with him: “There is among people I know this ‘code of decency.’I’ve rarely known anybody who didn’t have some decent aspects about him.” Although Joey initially escapes a murderous home situation by fleeing west with a drunkard cousin and a penitent whore, he ultimately rejects the unbridled individualism of “lightin’out for the territory” by resolving at Fort Stockton to return to the farm near Athens to claim his inheritance. Encounters with notorious bank robber Miller Dawson and the very civil Alister McIntosh, a clever sheepman, persuade him that the courage to act decently, not flight, solves problems. Unlike The Pumpkin Rollers (1996), which also affirms common decency as supe­ rior to unfettered individualism by enforcing civilized standards on a sexual predator, Cloudy in the West transcends that coming-of-age tale by letting Joey, who read McIntosh’s copy of Tom Sawyer, accept the risks of returning to civilization, where a woman rescues him from Meacham but where he moves toward manhood by whipping the bull, symbolic of predatory nature. Kelton’s authentic West includes hope, humor, and compassion, qualities that run counter to the mythic West’s violent individuals and to the pessimism of political correctness. L ew is T o la n d Te x a s Te c h Un iv e r sity P ress ...