The Road to Many a Wonder by David Wagoner (review)

Reviews 323 like Vroman’s Walpi except that it shows visible signs of decay and cul­ tural erosion. Recent photographs show how much people have been affected by the pressures from the mainstream culture. In Vroman’s pictures one still senses the pride in traditional dress and manners. In later pictures one perceives the advent of non-Indian clothing styles, cars, tele­ vision antennas and multitudinous intrusions of non-Indian life, some bene­ ficial, some worthless. There are numerous Vroman photographs taken in other villages — Mishongnovi, Hano, Shongopovi, Shipaulovi and Oraibi — showing what those settlements were like in his time. But his most appealing photos are of people — men, women, young people and children — holding still for portraits, performing workaday tasks or performing religious rituals. Two series of pictures document the Snake Dance and the Flute Dance, which the authors describe in enough detail to make the scenes particularly mean­ ingful. What emerges overall from the photos is Vroman’s respect and the respect of his compilers for the dignity of Hopi life as it once was, and as many older Hopis today still want it to be. The photos of Zuni and the Rio Grande Pueblos, to which less space is given, include a number of old churches that symbolize the intrusion of Spanish culture and Christianity. But here again Vroman’s accent was on the people, and one cannot leave these pages without the sense that many inner values esteemed by Western societies were present in the villages long before whites arrived on the scene. Although the section on the Navajos is relatively short, here also we sense a reflection of spiritual values and the worth of the individual. Dwellers at the Source is not only an invaluable view of Southwestern Indians as they were seventy-five years ago, it is a beautifully made book as well. HAROLD COURLANDER, Bethesda, Maryland The Road to Many a Wonder. By David Wagoner. (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1974. 275 pages. $6.95.) Horatio Alger’s Luck and Pluck was published in 1870 just a little more than a century before David Wagoner’s The Road to Many a Wonder. About two-thirds of the way through that century Nathanael West’s A Cool Million appeared in 1934 and seemed to put to death for all time Alger’s optimistic legend of the poor-but-honest boy making good. Wagoner’s new novel might, however, also bear Alger’s title (if someone else hadn’t appro­ priated it a few years ago), because throughout this upbeat tale first-person 324 Western American Literature narrator Ike Bender displays an uncommon pluck (even so called) that is at length rewarded by an even more uncommon stroke of luck. Like Alger’s heroes, Ike is a model of virtue from a humble background. Wagoner seems to be laboring — with particular appropriateness in view of the cur­ rent national scene — to restore to life a discredited fable. West’s A Cool Million was long slighted and has only recently begun to be appreciated because its quite literal dismemberment of an Algeresque hero proved not just distasteful but incomprehensible to depression-years’ readers already suffering enough from the lows that fate had administered to expectations formed by the “go-getter” fiction of the Saturday Evening Post and its vanished peers. West is now honored, however, as the forerunner of the “black humorists” like Barth and Vonnegut and James Purdy, who have flourished since 1950 and whose vision has seemingly reached the end of its trajectory with Thomas Pyncheon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Wagoner’s new novel proves as difficult to" read as West’s was in the 1930s, despite the simplicity of Ike’s colloquial narrative, because it runs counter to the reader’s anticipations formed by the recent prevalence of “black humor.” We have become so accustomed to a novel’s proceeding through a series of gruesome disasters to an apocalyptic catastrophe that we are confused and upset by the Algeresque vision of what can only be called Wagoner’s “white humor.” Has Wagoner succeeded in turning the clock back a century to breathe new life into a moribund tradition? Hardly. His novel finally deflates...