Charlotte M. Wright

The Sharp Teeth of Love by Doris Betts (review)

I expected to like The Sharp Teeth of Love because I loved Betts’s earxad lier novel Heading West, in which librarian Nancy Finch from N orth C arolina is kidnapped and forced to drive into the West. She manages to escape her abductor only by a risky descent on foot trails into the Grand Canyon, a journey that symbolizes how useless are hum anity’s “civilized” ways when pitted against the potentially fatal wildness of nature. The central character in The Sharp Teeth of Love, Luna Stone, is also a southern woman on a westward journey, and to Luna, likewise, the West is a dangerous place:

Rethinking the Literary Review

The present state of academic book reviewing, in literary studies at any rate, is neither happy nor healthy. A few journals pay close attention to their reviews and reviewers, and some good critiques do appear, but too often standxad ards are lax and reviews mediocre. Scholarly reviews are too frequently brief, impressionistic, formulaic, bland, badly written, or, most distressing of all, nothing more than sales pitches or gratuitous hatchet jobs, ever so thinly disguised. (Hoge and West, “Academic Book Reviewxad ing” 35)

Range Wars: Heated Debates, Sober Reflections, and Other Assessments of Texas Writing ed. by Craig Clifford, Tom Pilkington (review)

It happened in Fort Worth in September, 1981, when Larry McMurtry spoke about Texas literature to a crowd of Texans. The speech and its pubxad lished version “Ever a Bridegroom: Reflections on the Failure of Texas Literaxad ture” (included in this volume), were typical McMurtry: intelligent, thoughtprovoking, and . . . well . . . inflammatory. In it, he christened Texas literaxad ture “Country-and-Western literature” which was “disgracefully insular and uninformed.” Texas writers, he said, rely on telling the same “bucolic memoir” over and over, while Texas critics operate under the notion that criticism of one’s fellow Texans is “unneighborly.” He concluded by saying that “until Texas writers are willing to work harder, inform themselves more broadly, and stop looking only backward, we won’t have a literature of any interest.” The Texas literary establishment reeled from McMurtry’s blow, but came back punching. Texas Range Wars is a collection of their best responses. Craig Clifford’s fine essay, “Horseman, Hang On: The Reality of Myth in Texas Letters,” defends authors’ reliance on the nineteenth-century settings rather than twentieth-century ones. Much of its discussion of myth and reality, of the importance of place and regionalism, is applicable to western literature in general. “Reality,” he says, “includes myth, even the myths which patently falsify historical events.” Clay Reynolds’s essay “What Does It Take to Be a Texas Writer?” explores many possible definitions, but concludes that “dealing with those myths . . . is what makes an author a Texas writer.” Other essays, by A. C. Greene, José E. Limon, Celia Morris, Don Graham, James Ward Lee, and Marshall Terry, analyze various other aspects of the tempestuous world of Texas literature. The sanest advice is offered by Marshall Terry, himself a Texas novelist, who states, “the next step for Texas literature is to make criticism of Texas writing not personal opinion and not sociological or folkloric, but a literary discipline.” This book gives examples of all four types of criticism, but gives hope for more of the latter type in future “Range Wars” among the writers and critics of the Lone Star State.

Little Lucy's Papa: A Story of Silverland by Dan DeQuille/William Wright (review)

on each page, with the male or female voice dominant in bold or faded ink. The resulting rhythm and counterpoint are breathtaking, truly an impressive work. Sam Hamill has much in common with Robert Bringhurst, both as a translator of poetry from ancient and modern languages and as a voice calling for more than a cursory glance at man’s past. His Nootka Rose has a feeling of historicity. It is peopled by Herakleitos and the pagan gods of Greece and Spanish saints and dictators. Yet, there is a very different feel and rhythm to the Nootka Rose; it is more personal, more feminine than Bringhurst’s work. In a sense, it is a good companion piece to Pieces of Map, intuitive rather than intellectual, emotional rather than detached. Especially powerful are “Countxad ing the Bodies in Peacetime,” an epitaph for the victims of a modern urban landscape, and “Historical Romance,” an encounter with ghosts from Spain’s long past.