James Jones: An American Literary Orientalist by Steven R. Carter (review)

B o o k R e v i e w s 2 5 9 Soon the image reappears as a pebble cast into a pond with its ever expand­ ing ripples. This image is repeated several more times and is related to the ripple effects of Martiniano’s legal problems, to a star in the sky, and to “the vibrating drum” of the circular kiva. It appears finally in the novel’s last few lines as ripples reaching the “unguessed shores” of “the timeless skies of night.” This technique of leading the reader steadily to increasing awareness is a favorite one of Waters and is employed well in Of Time and Change. Thus, as a demonstration of Waters’s ever expanding scope and vision, we see in this book a lively companion piece to the earlier Mountain Dialogues. It is a book filled with charming, delightful, entertaining stories and with Waters’s wise and thought-provoking commentary. Of Time and Change is a very welcome final volume. It is good to hear his voice again. James Jones: An American Literary Orientalist. By Steven R. Carter. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. 191 pages, $32.20. Reviewed by Tony Williams Southern Illinois University at Carbondale Like Jack London, James Jones has several reasons to be regarded as a western American writer since two of his books were set in the geographical outer limits of American “Manifest Destiny.” Steven R. Carter’s recent book makes a distinct and intriguing claim for Jones’s literary significance. Rather than regarding him as a war novelist, Carter includes the writer among Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Ginsberg, and Kerouac, who all belonged to a particular tradition of American literary Orientalism. After selecting Jones for the subject of his doctoral dissertation in the 1970s, Carter both corre­ sponded with the writer and met him several times. He discovered that Jones was interested in Eastern themes of karma and reincarnation from the begin­ ning of his literary career. Carter’s book proposes a new examination of the writer’s work, particularly concentrating on his neglected masterpiece Some Came Running, a work that Carter relates to Jones’s other fiction. The present book is a revised and extended version of the original doc­ toral dissertation with new material supplied from the University of Illinois at Springfield Library Archives and other documents. Citing the original 1954 correspondence between Jones and critic Richard P. Adams in which they discussed ideas which would appear explicitly in Some Came Running, Carter claims that this novel contained the foundation of Jones’s learning process, ‘“the organic metaphor,’ in which each soul is forced to discern its similarity to all other souls on earth— and its isolation from them” (7). This system is articulated by Bob French in the novel and structures all of Jones’s fiction, according to Carter, who eloquently argues his case throughout his book. After writing the novel, Jones became concerned about “excessive didacti­ cism in his writing” and soon moved toward a “less explicit enunciation of a 2 6 0 W A L 3 4 ( 2 ) SUMMER 1 9 9 9 philosophy,” which would also influence his final novel, Whistle (35). Carter has written a provocative study shedding light on an author gen­ erally dismissed as a mere war novelist. In fact, the self-educated writer was a serious thinker on many cultural and literary issues. However, the problem with Carter’s study lies on its overemphasis of the Eastern influence in Jones’s writing and its lack of relation to contemporary historical and social issues which are also important. The book concentrates on issues raised within the original dissertation and lacks the relevant investigation of other sources from archives located at Yale and the Harry Ransom Humanities Center at the University of Texas at Austin. A comprehensive analysis may reveal that the reincarnation theme was but one of many ideas the author examined throughout his entire literary career. Furthermore, the transcendental themes Carter finds active in Jones’s fiction may also originate from other literary sources the writer was also familiar with, most notably in Jack London’s fic­ tion Before Adam and Martin Eden. Carter has written an important...