American Silence by Zeese Papanikolas (review)

W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n l it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 8 Antonia, as her quintessentially iconic text. Richard Millington sees Shadows as a radically anti-Victorian refusal of conventional interpretation that calls for other forms of readerly witness. John Murphy reads the novel as a “defense” of the “sacred canopy,” under which all humans have roles in a sacred drama, while Joseph Urgo views Shadows as the work of “a great American liberator ... who truly understood the potential of American secular and humanistic pluralism to serve art and to advance the human condition” (178, 187). The collection closes with Robert Thacker’s engrossing and meticulously researched history of a text that anchored Cather’s iconic status, E. K. Brown’s 1953 criti­ cal biography. Every essay in this volume has something significant to add to the constantly expanding canon of Cather scholarship, and the book’s range and substance confirm that her designation as “cultural icon” is entirely valid. American Silence. By Zeese Papanikolas. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007. 221 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by R. L. Streng Donelson Christian Academy, Nashville, Tennessee With American Silence, Zeese Papanikolas creates his own work of art, a tex­ tual montage of media by writer Henry Adams, painter Jackson Pollock, and photographer E. J. Bellocq, as well as work by other Americans whose legacies and lives Papanikolas insists belie the mythology of the American dream. Carefully mapped and beautifully crafted, Papanikolas’s latest work exposes the hollow core of the American identity, founded on possibilities generated by the imagination. With a nod to Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964) and Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950) as well as other classics of American cultural history, Papanikolas develops his thesis that the art of significant historical fig­ ures is at heart a lament for the loss of possibility and the ennui that accompa­ nies it. In the early days of the country, Americans believed that, as Papanikolas puts it, having “ripped ourselves from the terrible grasp of Mother England, it remained to conquer Mother Nature and her red children” and that “the Wilderness was ready to be exploited” (7, 9). Success in such endeavors, how­ ever, left only a sense of “something lost, lost perhaps even at the moment of gaining it, and possibly irretrievable” (19). That something is “the theme of wonder” (3). Now we’re empty and silent with nowhere to go since we’ve dis­ covered that even grandiose imaginings convert themselves into things “little and irrelevant” (37). Gone is the exuberance engendered by inspiration as well as the initial hope engendered by science, which has defrauded us by extending itself beyond our ability to control it. The consequence of our own advance­ ment is a chaos we can’t control. Instead, Papanikolas writes, American culture is blasé, characterized by a silence that has become “a kind of consolation for ... ambivalence” and that is the catalyst for “the downward pull of isolation” B o o k R e v ie w s 3 2 3 (80, 181). His critical analysis of a diverse collection of art collaborates with biographical research to support his thesis. Papanikolas’s work includes a list of illustrations and what he terms an overture, or opening proposal. His work closes with a surprisingly diverse list of acknowledgments, some not-very-helpful twenty pages of notes, and a ninepage index. The Qod of Animals. By Aryn Kyle. New York: Scribner, 2007. 305 pages, $25.00/$ 14-00. Reviewed by Andrea Clark Mason Washington State University, Pullman Aryn Kyle’s debut novel, The God of Animals, is a rarity: a first novel that doesn’t read like one. Kyle takes us into a small community, Desert Valley, Colorado, where class and cultural tensions are high. Twelve-year-old Alice Winston suffers from preadolescent angst compounded by the weight of a class­ mate’s death. The absence of her sister, Nona, who left town to marry a rodeo rider, and her mother’s twelve-year disappearance into the bedroom under the guise of “being tired...