Edited by Michael Kowalewski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 304 pages. $24.95.
As is by now seemingly standard in academic publishing, the subtitle is more reflective of the book's content and apparent intentions than is the title. Reading The West is not an encyclopedic effort to cover every author or even every literary movement, nor does it purport to offer a definitive theoretical position vis-à-vis its subject. What it does do, and exceedingly well, is suggest the wealth and variety of the literature of the western United States.
In many ways this is the sort of book the canon wars were all about, and it betrays no discomfort at being on the winning side. Jeffers is mentioned in passing—as an example, counter-example, or literary ancestor—five times, and given fuller treatment in sections totaling eight pages in two different essays. He is acknowledged as the pre-eminent western poet of his generation, but scholars of Jeffers shouldn't feel the need to read this book for what it will tell them about their poet. Steinbeck receives similar treatment, but so does Kenneth Rexroth. Willa Cather is mentioned five times in the introduction, but not in any of the critical essays. D'Arcy McNickle receives most of a 21-page essay. Jean Stafford receives 20 pages, and Bret Harte splits 24 pages with Albert Bierstadt. And it makes sense. No one argues here that Harte or McNickle are better or more important authors than are Jeffers or Cather, but what the book shows is that these critics have more interesting things to say and more of it about McNickle and Stafford than they do about, say, Steinbeck or Sinclair Lewis (who is mentioned only as an aside in a reference to his foremost biographer).
Reading The West offers itself as a frankly revisionist introduction to the current state of the study of western literature, and, given the selected bibliography at the end, and the diversity of the essays, it should be a useful sup- plementary text for graduate and perhaps undergraduate seminars on the literature of the West. Rather than trying to cover each sub-field, Kowalewski instead offers us an admirable mix, suggestive of the broader range out there. There are essays, for example, on American Indian fiction and Asian American drama. And, although they are not covered in essays, sources on American Indian drama and autobiography and on Asian American fiction and non-fiction are listed in the bibliography. It is an interestingly well-put-together book in which the gaps, overlaps, and disagreements between critics are almost as engaging as the best of the essays individually.
If there is a problem with this book it is that the quality of the essays varies widely. Most of the essays offer well-written and thoughtful summaries of the state of criticism in their particular sub-fields of western literature, but do so either without developing their sub-fields further or doing so only slightly. Those essays that do slightly further previous studies tend to summarize their sub-fields and offer, as developments of major importance, minor twists on the current state of the criticism. Although experts in any of the sub-fields will un-doubtedly find reasons to quibble with various minor points of interpretation, they will otherwise find nothing too remarkable about the essays in their areas of expertise. Be that as it may, since no one is an expert in every sub-field, the combination of these introductory (or perhaps re-introductory) essays will be almost certain to provide some useful new material to most readers. Also, to editor Kowalewski's credit, he chose good writers for the boilerplate material. For example, even though James D. Houston's essay on California fiction offers absolutely nothing new in the way of critical insights, it is a pleasure to read and more than satisfactorily fulfills its introductory purpose. Shannon Applegate's essay on the collection and critical usage of western diaries and letters, Philip Burnham's essay on identity in American Indian fiction, Linda Hamalian's study of the poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, and Misha Berson's critical history of Asian American drama are similarly diverting and useful introductions to their respective subjects.
In the essays which attempt to break new ground, the quality of the writing and sometimes the analysis vary greatly. The best of these pieces are revelations of the power of both literature and literary analysis. If you haven't already read Jean Stafford's The Mountain Lion, you will feel compelled to track it down and read it whole after you delight in Susan Rosowski's wonderful essay on that novel's feminist revision of western myth. And if you have read Stafford's story before, you will return to it with new understanding and appreciation. The best essay in the book, however, is William Bevis's brilliant "Region, Power, Place." Buy this book yourself, or tell your library to buy this book, but—if you have been waiting for a theoretically sophisticated conceptualization of regionalism which doesn't reduce western writers (and regionalism in general) to auto-matic second-class status—this is the essay for which you've been waiting. Even if you hate theory, if you care about the critical tradition of the literature of the American West, you need to read Bevis's essay. Not only does the novelist/professor from Montana offer a relatively jargon-free theoretical explication of regionalism and tribalism as alternatives to modernism, post-modernism, and the exchange economy, he also does for the novels of the neglected American Indian writer D'Arcy McNickle what Rosowski does for The Mountain Lion. Oddly though, given the strong presence in the volume of American Indian writers and writing, the two most problematic essays are marred by almost stereotypical insensitivity to the complexity of American Indian cultures and their relations to the different colonial invaders. For example, although there are other problems with David Rains Wallace's otherwise intelligent piece on nature writing (his dichotomies might seem simplistic to those of post-structuralist bent), his comparisons of Emerson and Thoreau's thinking to American Indian perception of nature are seriously flawed. He continually refers to "Native American religion" and "Native American practice" as if such singular, unified entities as American Indian or Native American culture and identity not only exist now but have always existed. That flaw is so fundamental that it obscures his otherwise important point about how revolutionary Emerson's relation to nature was for a Harvard man. It's even worse when he notes that Emerson on nature "sounds more like Chief Seattle or Black Elk . . . than like Socrates or Wordsworth" (47). The naiveté of Wallace's choice of these two American Indians—whose works were so notoriously heavy-handedly translated, edited, and rewritten by their white translators (who had almost certainly been force-fed Emerson as schoolchildren) that some critics question the feasibility of ever properly attributing authorship of the works—overpowers the point he is trying to make with irony. The essay still manages to make some useful comparisons between the political and cultural strategies of different nature writers, but the damage to Wallace's authority has already been done. Margaret Garcia Davidson's essay on the contested cultural loyalties of early Mexican-American novelists is similarly problematic. She decries Spanish colonial domination of American Indian peoples, and later U.S. colonial domination of American Indian, Spanish-American, and Mexican-American peoples, but her silence about Mexican colonial domination of American Indians is striking. Despite this flaw, when read with a necessary degree of suspicion, her analyses remain fairly convincing, and the structure of her argument holds up surprisingly well.
Reading The West is not a perfect book—only the one essay by Bevis prom-ises to be indispensable—but as a whole it should prove useful in the classroom, and in its parts it has something to offer any serious reader of the literature of the American West. We are fortunate to have it.
Kevin Hearle is a published poet and educator living in San Mateo, California.

© 2005 Jeffers Studies
Contact: Jeffers Studies