Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Love Life by James D. Houston

1986; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 21; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.1986.0177

1948-7142

Nancy Owen Nelson,

American Literature and Culture

Reviews 239 of his own illustrations, ascribed to Keane, which convey both graphic edi­ torial comment and bold, reinforcing images consistent with the intent and flow of the novel. CORALIE BEYERS Utah State University Love Life. By James D. Houston. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985. 260 pages, $15.95.) To read a plot summary of Love Life could lead the reader to expect little of literary complexity from Houston’s novel. Holly Andersen Doyle, once aspiring country-western singer and composer, wife for ten years of Grover Doyle and mother of two, escapes briefly from her marriage when she finds out about Grover’s infidelity with a younger woman, Sarah. However, while tracing Holly’s escape and beginning reconciliation with Grover, Houston interweaves the first-person narrative with an unexpected mythology based upon the theme of man’s (and woman’s) primordial nature. In Holly’s brief trip to New York City to rediscover her past, in her ruminations about the nature of men and women, mothers and sons, she explores her own conscious­ ness—her earlier “escapes” from marriage, her often accurate premonitions, her ability through “double vision” to achieve moments of “high recognition” of truth. Houston’s technique involves a three-part structure, each part introduced by an appropriate allusion. Part I, dealing with Holly’s discovery of the affair and her flight, begins with the blues lyrics— “Because you treat me baby, / Like a lowdown dirty dog.” Part II, focusing on Holly’s internal battle with emotion, starts with a passage from Madame Bovary— “Her temperament was more sentimental than artistic. She sought emotions and not landscapes.” The final part begins with I Ching— “All the suffering of humankind is pro­ duced by attachment to a previous condition of existence,”—and concerns Holly’s exploration of her inner self as she is “liberated” from childhood innocence. Houston develops the primordial theme through the motif of Holly’s flight, her exposure to primal female wrath at a New Feminism meeting, her own instinctive rage at Grover, and her territorial confrontation with Sarah, her rival. The violent California storm returns the family— Holly, Grover, the children, and step-mother Leona (Holly’s “spirit mother”)— to a state of prehistory. Thus isolated, they fight to save their land from flood during the day and sing songs and tell tales by the fire at night, much like ancient man. What makes Houston’s book western literature? Two obvious factors are the setting in a rural area near San Francisco and the country-western music theme, expressed by Holly as “our New Mythology” of stories of human con­ flict, pain, and resolution. Less apparent, and handled symbolically by Holly’s brief and rather unfulfilling trip to New York City, is the conflict between 240 Western American Literature eastern and western consciousness—the “fast-lane” mentality versus the pri­ mordial struggle for survival. Similar to much of serious western fiction,Holly’s conflict involves the internal exploration of instinct and the external survival struggle. Hers and Grover’s fight to save their land against the onslaught of ambivalent nature isaccompanied by the issuesof the survival of the marriage, and more importantly, Holly’s personal survival through her exploration of blood kinships and male-female relationships. As she puts it in a powerful passage reflecting on Grover’s father, Montrose, something in his look could tell her more about the man I married and this son we had spawned, and thus about myself, since we all turn together, teaching one another, by these tiny daily lessons, who we are. NANCY OWEN NELSON Henry Ford Community College The State of Stony Lonesome. By Jessamyn West. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1984. 184 pages, $12.95.) In her last novel, Jessamyn West revisits territory familiar to readers of her previous California fiction: a girl comes of age in Los Angeles County of the early 1920s, where recent settlers from Indiana (mostly teetotaling church­ goers, some with tuberculosis, many with odd first names) try to live in midwestern fashion in a land where geography and the general flow of life seem familiar yet slightly askew. Asusual, West’sprose isspare, lovely, and powerful, as in this passage...