to the Indians, a cultural seesawing repeated throughout the novel. Most amazingly, Crabb says he rode with Custer at the Little Big Horn and survived to the overripe age of III to tell his tale.
Clearly, Crabb's literary lineage starts with Natty Bumppo, but with a twist explained by Brooks Landon: 'Jack's achievements are Cheyenne, his aspirations are white, and therein lies a kind of captivity against which his shiftiness has no power.' However trapped by a language that will not release him from his white cultural bias, 'Jack Crabb,' according to French critic Daniel Royot, 'is no radical dropout keeping Without Marx or Jesus in his pocket, but an American picaro teasing his reader out of conformity and confirming once more America's saving grace which is to laugh at herself.'
Yet no one laughs at two of the 'nonfiction novels' set in the West: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966) and Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song (1979, Pulitzer Prize). One of the murderers in Capote's book has a Native American mother, and parts of In Cold Blood remind one of a bloodcurdling Indian captivity narrative. Likewise, Mailer's 'true-life novel' overflows with authentic details of contemporary Mormon life, but the structure of The Executioner's Song resembles that of a Bret Harte story in which a bloody killer eventually reveals a heart of gold. Just as romanticized but more concise, Mailer's earlier novel Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967) takes us bear-hunting in Alaska.
Other Eastern novelists have also used the West as a setting for one or two of their novels. Bernard Malamud based A New Life (1961) on his experiences as a professor at Oregon State University, and place plays a role in that novel, though mostly as a target for Malamud's satire. John Updike sets A Month of Sundays (1975) and S. (1988) in the West, mainly to shock his protagonists into serious reflection on their Eastern lives.
Former Easterners who have moved west have had greater success in writing novels of the West. The Western works of Thomas McGuane, Richard Ford, and John Nichols have generally improved as these writers have come to a deeper understanding of their adopted -449- region. See especially McGuane's Keep the Change (1989), Ford's Wildfire (1990), and Nichols's American Blood (1989), a powerful example of a novelistic Theater of Cruelty.
Before his apparent suicide, Richard Brautigan had lived near McGuane in Montana, although Brautigan had also taken to spending part of each year in Japan. Born and raised in the Northwest, Brautigan moved to San Francisco in the mid-1950s when the Beat movement was under way. He first found print as a poet, and some critics argue that his masterpiece, Trout Fishing in America (1967), should be read not as a novel but as a serial poem like those of Jack Spicer, Brautigan's friend and mentor. Although knowing Spicer's work can help a reader to understand Brautigan, Trout Fishing should be classified as a novel, for its author intended it to be one, as he indicated when he published 'The Lost Chapters of Trout Fishing in America' in Esquire (October 1970).
Allusions abound in Trout Fishing, providing necessary clues to the novel's meaning. The first chapter, for example, alludes to Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, to Tom and Jerry cartoons, to Dante's Paradiso, and to Franz Kafka's Amerika. This hodgepodge of allusions alerts the reader to the book's mixture of wit, humor, irony, idealism, and angst.
Other novels by Brautigan fall short of his achievement in Trout Fishing, although The Hawkline Monster (1974), The TokyoMontana Express (1980), and So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (1982) also provide an interesting mix of postmodernism with a Western sensibility. No one has yet equaled Trout Fishing, although Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Tom Robbins's Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), Gino Sky's Appaloosa Rising (1980), and Gerald Locklin's The Case of the Missing Blue Volkswagen (1984) join Brautigan's best to form what half a century ago would have seemed an unlikely tradition: Menippean satire of the West.
Fifty years ago the West did have the novels of Dashiell Hammett. His The Maltese Falcon (1930), James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1935), and Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (1939) explored the seamy side of urban life. Yet such tough guy writers omitted truly shocking details of crime, sex, drugs, and violence. -450-
Now such details can be found in John Rechy's City of Night (1963) and Charles Bukowski's Ham on Rye (1982). In the late twentieth century, parts of some Western cities have become more violent and dangerous than the old frontier.
The novel of Los Angeles already constituted a subgenre of American fiction when Joan Didion's Play It as It Lays appeared in 1970. The novelists who created that subgenre rank among the most important of the early twentieth century. Besides the tough guy and detective writers, they include F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O'Hara, Nathanael West, and Budd Schulberg. To that list must be added British exiles Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and Evelyn Waugh. As these names indicate, 'any discussion of the Los Angeles novel must begin with the observation that it is chiefly the work of the outsider — if not the tourist, then the newcomer.' David Fine, who makes that observation in his introduction to a collection of critical essays titled Los Angeles in Fiction (1984), also notes that 'the displacement experienced by the writers fostered a way of writing about the region that differed qualitatively from the way other regions have been written about.'
Most Los Angeles novels satirize Hollywood and southern California, pointing to the wasteland that lies behind the Disneyland facade. On one level, Play It as It Lays tells a story of the real heartbreak and despair in such a wasteland; but 'at another level,' as Mark Royden Winchell says, ' Didion seems to be writing a parody of the novel of despair.' Didion's husband, John Gregory Dunne, is a transplanted Easterner whose True Confessions (1977) and Dutch Shea, Jr. (1982) match Didion's satirization of California life. Many of Didion and Dunne's contemporaries — Alison Lurie, Thomas Pynchon, and Robert Stone, to name a few — have also written Los Angeles novels.
Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose (1971, Pulitzer Prize) not only debunks Hollywood's myth of the West but also links past to present and explores universal themes such as integrity and love. The firstperson narrator, Lyman Ward, has suffered both the loss of a leg from a crippling bone disease and the desertion of his wife, who has run off with the bone surgeon. A retired history professor, Lyman retreats to his grandparents' old home in Grass Valley, California. There, to keep his son from moving him to a nursing home, Lyman -451- proves his mental fitness by researching his grandparents' papers and writing a book about them. Stegner created the portrait of Lyman's grandparents by using as models an actual nineteenth-century Western novelist, Mary Hallock Foote, and her husband Arthur. In fact, up until the last third of the novel, so closely does Stegner recreate the details of the Footes' lives that he quotes and paraphrases passages from Mary's letters and novels. Between chapters of Lyman's biography of his grandparents, Stegner dramatizes Lyman's inner struggle to overcome bitterness and loneliness, along with his caustic reaction to the counterculture of the 1960s.
Appearing predisposed to side with his grandmother, Lyman eventually assumes the worst about her and imagines his grandfather to have been a kind of demigod like the hero of The Virginian. Under his professorial demeanor, Lyman tries to conceal from himself his view of women as ultimately weak and faithless. He also tries to hold on to his self-image as blameless victim, but a shocking nightmare forces him to consider a reconciliation with his ex-wife.
Stegner's use of the nightmare is a brilliant and significant tour de force. He initially presents the nightmare as if it were an actual event. Such a dream sequence with its Freudian implications seems similar to a passage from a modernist novel, but Stegner has argued that 'the kind of western writer who writes modern[ist] literature immediately abdicates as a Westerner.' In appropriating a modernist technique, however, Stegner should be seen not as abdicating his regional identity but as taking a necessary step toward the recognition of a conflict concealed in the Western psyche.
In that conflict, which is both personal and social, desire clashes with responsibility. Lyman's nightmare reveals the conflict and parallels the scene of infidelity that he imagines must have happened if his grandmother was guilty of adultery. He admits there is no proof of her guilt, but he imagines the infidelity as taking place during
