We Who Work the West: Class, Labor, and Space in Western American Literature by Kiara Kharpertian (review)

Grounded in a winning insistence that "belonging can become a force available to all of us and that literature provides a laboratory in which to test its properties and potentialities," Kharpertian's book grapples with the complex interrelations of labor, class, and space while providing a tour of some of western literature's more down-and-out corners (xxii). In doing so, Kharpertian analyzes the West's "deep scars of repeated and lasting displacements, deterritorializations, and dispossessions," from California to Texas (xxii). She argues that class-steeped stories of a purportedly authentic West reflect the contradictions—not just regional but national—that emerge as space and identity are differentially shaped by labor. In readings of well over a dozen novels, Kharpertian offers case studies that trace dramatically shifting literary representations of these components of identity and politics over the last century and more.

Beginning with the deterministic naturalism of Frank Norris's McTeague, Kharpertian shows how labor—when it becomes a defining feature of identity and space—cuts both ways. It provides McTeague with a living and a sense of self but ties him inextricably to a violent state of nature that Norris imagines as inherent in his working-class identity. Such class identity in turn defines spaces abandoned to transgressive violence: rough parts of town and isolated deserts. Maria Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don (1885), meanwhile, highlights the noncontiguous overlap of nationality, ethnicity, class, and space through the post-annexation category affiliations wrapped up in the label "Californio," which Kharpertian reads as an emergent Chicano civic ethos. The labor migrations and erosions of the dustbowl are examined (in contrast to Steinbeck's triumphal Grapes of Wrath) through a quintet of novels by Sanora Babb, Frank Waters, and John Fante, which highlight the reality and prevalence of failure and collapse. Kharpertian observes in each of these Depression novels a particularly western evaporation of "rootedness" that haunts the stories and space. Of course, no study of work in the West would be complete without considering the cowboy, and in one of the book's strongest chapters Kharpertian draws her exemplars from the novels of Larry McMurtry, Elmer Kelton, and Cormac McCarthy. Focusing on post-WWII-era Texas, she reads these fictional cowboys as economic refugees whose work-based worlds crumble around them—yet they remain mythic figures of authenticity through the performative labor of rodeos. As her reading draws out the contradictions within this myth of labor in the context of ascendant capitalism, she also offers a model to our era of enduring peons, the purportedly authentic (masculine) labor of coalminers, roughnecks, and farmers. Read in conjunction with her commentary on cowboys, Kharpertian's analysis of the narratively obscured labor in Native American novels is also insightful. Building on the work of Chadwick Allen, Gerald Vizenor, and Philip Deloria, she argues that the particular varieties of alienated labor and space in the fiction of Linda Hogan, Sherman Alexie, and Stephen Graham Jones expose the pernicious binary of modernization and tradition so ingrained in representations of western Indian Country. The final chapter takes up Philip Meyer's 2013 novel The Son to demonstrate that in a culture that disdains labor and tries to ignore space, belonging may never be more than provisional and contingent.

Readers of Western American Literature may already know another tragic fact about this book: Kiara Kharpertian died in 2016 after years of struggle with breast cancer. Most book reviews do not acknowledge the fact that books will outlive their authors, though in some vague sense we all know this to be true. In so doing, Kharpertian's book not only contributes importantly to scholarship but acts as a monument to "her impassioned mind, her heroic work ethic, and her determined courage" (ix). It will be of interest not only to those studying labor or western American literature, but to Kiara's friends and...