Small Rocks Rising by Susan Lang (review)

218 WAL 3 8 .2 SUMMER 2 0 0 3 withstanding familial pressure and Paul’s despicable maneuvers, 1 liked and admired her more and more. She is a true watershed in McGuane’s progression as a writer. It’s been ten years since Nothing but Blue Skies, but I cannot begrudge McGuane the long wait. Small Rocks Rising. By Susan Lang. Reno: University of N evada Press, 2002. 235 pages, $17.00. Reviewed by Donn Rawlings Professor Emeritus, Yavapai College, Prescott, Arizona Ruth Farley, the protagonist of this novel, having set out to homestead alone in a remote California canyon, decides to move a granite boulder obstruct­ ing the site she chose to build her house. The two men who trucked in her belong­ ings scoff at her claim that she can handle this task. “Matt patted her shoulder. ‘Ruth,’ he said, ‘you may be the most capable woman I ever met. Honest. But not even John and I together could move that boulder’” (3). The lengthy narra­ tive early in the book of Ruth’s attempts to budge the rock may be a bit wearing on the reader, and surely her tactics seem (to the masculine perspective?) awk­ ward and ill chosen. She breaks up part of her lumber supply trying futilely for leverage, then ties a rope around her waist and tugs desperately at the demon rock, succeeding only in bruising herself. Given this repeated failure, one may begin to wonder where this novel is headed. In truth, Susan Lang’s Small Rocks Rising takes on its impressive power through just this kind of effect. Ruth and (sometimes) the story about her embody a cussedly self-willed refusal to be kept from the most direct and elemental wrestling with the world. This work is of startling, convincing, and sometimes uncomfortable physicality, both in the description of Ruth’s struggle to come to grips with the canyon place that enthralls, threatens, and changes her, and in her unrelenting drive to express and clarify a sexuality native to herself and not the mores of her time. (And not, one may add, indigenous to the conventions of Westerns, although she has to maneuver through the snares laid by such conven­ tions, active in the character types that make up her 1920s desert community.) Having escaped being trapped in the feminine image molded by a finishing school, Ruth has to confront condescension and brutal sexual resentment from men around her. Most tellingly, despite her willingness to show her strength where convention asks her to appear weak, she also has to avoid the temptation to believe that her autonomy can be gained in being “manlike.” When a cow­ boy tells her, “[Ijnside you’re more like us,” Ruth objects. “That’s what I used to think, Johnny. But that was because I just didn’t know what being a woman was supposed to be like. Maybe no one knows” (222-23). Eventually, Ruth finds a way to finesse the boulder. And through loss and renewal she enters more deeply into the rhythms of the canyon world, finding ways to survive and be self-sufficient and yet less at odds with the life-taking and BOOK REVIEWS 219 life-giving nature of that world. As for what a woman is supposed to be like, the novel has the integrity ofboth refusing to accept easy answers and refusing to give up asking. A romantic interlude cut tragically short confirms Ruth’s ability to grow through love but does not define her: neither through romance nor tragedy is it a closure for life or novel. In more than one sense, she is an outsider at the end, deeply hurt but strong in facing an open future, although perhaps more able to connect with people in her community strong enough to accept her. Ruth’s mother, Cally, is quickly sketched, but memorably: Cally, too, is an outsider, but demeaning and selfish in her attempts to control Ruth. One senses that the author finds in Cally not just a negative energy against which Ruth can define herself, but also a figure in whose darkness lies a part of the history of crabbed human potential that needs to...