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Reviewed by:
  • Two-Buck Chuck and The Marlboro Man: The New Old West by Frank Bergon
  • Gregory L. Morris, emeritus
Frank Bergon, Two-Buck Chuck and The Marlboro Man: The New Old West. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2019. 264 pages. Paper, $24.95.

The novels of Frank Bergon have consistently explored the complex culture and history of the American West, both Old and New. In Two-Buck Chuck and The Marlboro Man, Bergon shifts genres but continues to pursue his study of what makes—and has made—the West tick. In this new work Bergon turns to portraiture, putting together an incisive and intriguing collection of essays that seek to illuminate the personalities that comprise the western identity. He is specifically interested in the world of California's Great Central Valley, a landscape with which he is intimately familiar, having grown up there and been schooled there by family and friends in the ways of that particular place. These essays provide Bergon with a means to return to this place, both literally and literarily, and what he finds when he does return is an altered geography, a "new millennial West" where farmland has given way to suburban sprawl and where the western American dream continues to live in varied forms (8). [End Page 454]

One of Bergon's concerns is with the traditional diversity of the Valley, and in the book's first section he constructs a profile of some of the individuals involved in working this place, many of whom are acquaintances of his. Central to this section is Fred Franzia, who created the wine known as Two-Buck Chuck and discovered a new species of success in the New West. The Valley is a niche geography, a place where a fresh idea can take root and flourish. It is a place where an undocumented Mexican immigrant named Sal Arriola can participate in Valley entrepreneurship and rise to a position of economic privilege and responsibility directing the operations of the Franzia Winery. There is also room for ranchers and farmers like Mitch Lasgoity, a Basque cattle rancher who relishes the worth of owning "a piece of dirt," even when that dirt finds itself in the middle of a five-year drought and a water crisis with no immediate solution within sight (80). Bergon does not shy away from taking hard, critical looks at the problems engendered by the Valley dream; nor is he reluctant to critique some of the New West historiography of the Valley and of the greater landscape of California.

In his book's second section, Bergon paints a half-dozen miniatures of folks who live in and help define the character of the Grand Central Valley. These are African American, Chicano, Native American, and Asian American folk, all of whom have complex relationships with the Valley and all of whom have had varied experiences within that Valley world. Bergon is especially interested here in the degrees of racism these individuals have encountered in living their Valley lives and in the extent to which intolerance colors the nature of this place. One of Bergon's subjects in this section is the late mixed-blood writer Louis Owens, a one-time colleague and long-time friend of Bergon. This portrait is particularly poignant, as Bergon makes an attempt to understand Owens's suicide, its causes, and its painful effects on those friends Owens left behind. But Bergon never makes himself the center of these stories, even when he plays a part in them; instead, he lets people tell their stories themselves, accented and inflected and more or less pure.

The third and final section of Two-Buck Chuck and The Marlboro Man takes up the mythology and trope of the Marlboro Man, looking at two of the trope's fleshed-out configurations. The first [End Page 455] is that of Claude Dallas, a self-created buckaroo and Marlboro Man wannabe. Dallas is a character whom Bergon imaginatively drew upon in his novel Wild Game (1995) and reveals here in all of his demythologized pitifulness. Bergon draws a line from Dallas to the Malheur Wildlife Refuge standoff, all a part of what he calls "Marlboro Country in conflict...

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