Wyoming Stories by Gretel Ehrlich, and: City Tales by Edward Hoagland (review)

166 Western American Literature Wyoming Stories. By Gretel Ehrlich. City Tales. By Edward Hoagland. Capra Back-to-Back Series, Volume VI. (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1986. 162 pages, $7.50 paper.) Of course one distrusts a Californian in Wyoming, especially if she got there by way of a documentary film project, and knows more about the area than some who grew up in the cold high places between the Montana Highline and South Pass. But Gretel Ehrlich, perhaps because of the agonized route she took to the Bighorn country (a route sketched in beautiful essays in The Solace of Open Spaces) and because of a considerable poetic talent, sees the landscape and people enough askew to see them afresh in the short stories that fill her half of this collection. The local ranching folk move shadowed by their pasts and richly entangled, suggesting the novel brewing behind these “segments of a work-inprogress .” Her selection of incidents mirrors the view of life that also lurks behind the typically appalling Montana/Wyoming sense of humor—a view that promises little in the way of redemption but finds something durable along the embarrassing edge where the grotesque can include human tender­ ness. The story of Pinkey, the old hired cowhand, is a case in point. An inci­ dent in which the drunken cowboy, along with neighborhood dogs, chases after and barks at cars, and is finally hit by one, could have been drawn more sharply toward pathos. But Pinkey survives, gets off a few good lines that will be absorbed into jokes in bars and cafes, and settles back, not without insight, into the painful and funny rhythms of his life. Set during World War II, the stories gain perspective through the pres­ ence in the back-country of Japanese-Americans in a relocation camp. The juxtaposition allows Ehrlich to work some fine Active magic of image and event. In a wonderful moment a strayed occupant of the camp, a Los Angeles flower grower, joins an odd group of locals under a table in a darkened road­ side bar. During what looks like the Apocalypse-come-to-Wyoming, they indulge in a bout of storytelling that recalls—for an instant—a scene in Isak Dinesen. Truly Ehrlich’s people are full of story, and it is no disparagement of her tales to see them as a fascinating step between the memories explored in The Solace of Open Spaces and the novel that must be coming. Edward Hoagland is given less space here only because this writer, whose essays have often treated the West, locates his half of this collection of stories in New York. Hoagland conveys a unique, unmediated physical quality, something peculiar to the way he sees people and (characteristically) animals, something related to the compelling sensual closeness of violence—as in the wrenching intimacy of death at the end of his first novel, Cat Man—and yet, something quite free of sensationalism. In one story, Arnie Bush, aging in a cul-de-sac of his life’s meanderings, keeps a large alligator confined in his bathtub—symbolism aside, the sheer bulky presence of “the beast’s clumsy galumphing” is memorable. In another piece, Kwan takes a holiday tour amidst the swarming bodies, sideshow humanity and incipient violence of Coney Island. Kwan and Bush are isolates; in “The Witness,” the protagonist Reviews 167 seems drawn beyond observation into the action, into deeper involvement with his lover and her child and with the street violence he monitors from a laboratory window. In the end, though, he decides “to move uptown and devote myself to making a different start in the city.” DONN RAWLINGS Yavapai College Seventeen Syllables: 5 Stories of Japanese American Life. By Hisaye Yama­ moto. Edited by Robert Rolf and Norimitsu Ayuzawa. (Tokyo: Kirihara Shoten Publishing, Inc., 1985. 95 pages, including 13 pages of notes in Japa­ nese, 900 yen.) There is still no complete edition of Hisaye Yamamoto’s fiction, nor is there even, to my knowledge, an accurate bibliography of her work. (Elaine Kim’s excellent Asian American Literature misses at least two items.) This volume—published in Japan, testimony to her neglect here—is the best response...