Endearment (1978), McMurtry created the 'urban Western,' a novel that reveals the hollowness at the core of the late twentiethcentury urban West.
As if seeking the very heart of urban darkness, McMurtry picked Hollywood, Washington, D.C., and Las Vegas as the respective locations for his next three novels — Somebody's Darling (1978), Cadillac Jack (1982), and The Desert Rose (1983). Although his novels of the 1970s and early 1980s show McMurtry experimenting with different points of view and with varying levels of realism, his next work established him as one of the masters of American fiction.
Lonesome Dove (1985, Pulitzer Prize) not only dominated the best-seller lists for months but was also recognized as 'a masterpiece in the genre of trail-driving novels,' as Jane Nelson put it. As long and sprawling as a real trail drive, Lonesome Dove keeps us interested by making us care about the two principal characters: Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae. Former Texas Rangers, Call and McCrae decide to drive a herd of cattle to Montana, where they plan to claim land and start ranching. They reach their goal, but not without encountering dozens of life-threatening dangers along the way.
McMurtry's description of a nest of snakes attacking a hapless cowboy is one of the most bone-chilling scenes in contemporary fiction. Indeed, so much violence fills the novel that it seems as if McMurtry was trying to drive a stake through the heart of the Hollywood myth that the good guys always rode off unharmed into the sunset. Paradoxically, Lonesome Dove resuscitates interest in the Old West by making it more believable. McMurtry's trail drive includes passages of metaphysical questioning and angst as well as scenes of -460- sex and violence — all of which make the novel palatable to late twentieth-century taste. More important, Lonesome Dove satisfies the desire for a sustained narrative that creates the illusion of 'the real thing.'
A complete history of the novel of the West will have to include dozens of other authors who have not achieved fame as great as McMurtry's but who have nevertheless influenced the development of the West's fiction, usually with one or two 'small masterpieces.' Such a reputation attaches to William Goyen, William Humphrey, and Tom Lea, Texas writers from the generation preceding McMurtry's. Of novels written by McMurtry's contemporaries, Diane Johnson's The Shadow Knows (1972) depicts the terror of a victimized California woman; Larry Woiwode's Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1975) portrays several generations of a North Dakota family; Robert Flynn's North to Yesterday (1967) beautifully describes the human comedy of a trail drive; and Charles Portis's True Grit (1968) tells with comic genius the story of a frontier lawman and an adolescent girl who join forces in their pursuit of justice. Although McMurtry overshadows many of his contemporaries, recent novels by Clay Reynolds, Tom Spanbauer, Douglas Unger, and Norman Zollinger have shown that these writers might eventually match McMurtry's achievement.
In its scrupulous authenticity, Lonesome Dove reflects extensive authorial research. By itself, authenticity does not, of course, make a novel first-rate. But when serious novelists make authenticity one of the primary qualities of their art, the basis of fact can help to create the illusion of reality, and the best of such authentic fiction serves not only as satisfying literature but also as a form of history. Many contemporary Western novelists might be classified as 'neorealists,' but some of them place an especially high value on authenticity. In John Keeble's Yellowfish (1980), the characters reflect on the history of the Chinese in the Old West. Pete Dexter's Deadwood (1986) follows Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane in the South Dakota of 187678, and Frank Bergon's Shoshone Mike (1987) is based on an actual Indian-white conflict in early twentieth-century Nevada. Research into later twentieth-century Western history enriches Craig Lesley's Winterkill (1984), about a Northwest Indian rodeo contestant, and also Levi Peterson's The Backslider (1986), about a Mormon cow-461- boy's struggles with desires of the flesh. Women have also enhanced their novels by a similar dedication to authenticity. Gretel Ehrlich's Heart Mountain (1988) depicts a Wyoming-Montana relocation camp that held Japanese Americans during World War II; and Molly Gloss's The Jump-Off Creek (1989) portrays a single woman homesteader in the Oregon mountains during the 1890s.
Of all the Western neorealists, Ivan Doig has seemed the most likely to become heir-apparent to Wallace Stegner. This House of Sky (1978), Doig's memoir about growing up in Montana, was nominated for a National Book Award and is reminiscent of Stegner's Big Rock Candy Mountain and Wolf Willow. Doig's Montana trilogy — English Creek (1984), Dancing at the Rascal Fair (1987), and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana (1990) — recasts in fiction his memories of his family, his childhood, and his home place. If the late Richard Hugo was right when he said that 'the place triggers the mind to create the place,' then what sort of place emerges from the work of Ivan Doig? No Eden, Doig's Montana can almost match the violence of McMurtry's Texas. But Doig's characters, although no angels, seem generally less hopeless or hollow than McMurtry's. Strong sentimentality marks Doig's characters and passages of his prose, but the sentiment is genuine and balanced by his account of over a century of unremitting losses. Ride with Me not only celebrates Montana's centennial and the West's first post-frontier century, it also articulates the view of most contemporary Western authors that we must change our minds and our lifestyle in order to save the planet.
Most recently, the novel of the West has been significantly enriched by the outstanding first novels of Asian Americans Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. Asian Americans have lived in the West since the California gold rush of 1849, and their experiences have been those of a minority excluded for decades from landownership and confined to Chinatowns. Their literary tradition has developed in stages similar to those marking the traditions of the region's other minorities. At first, like other minorities, Asians appeared in Anglo literature as stereotypes. Eventually, authors arose from among each ethnic group.
After World War II, Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart (1946) depicted Filipino immigrant workers, Toshio Mori's The Woman from Hiroshima (1980) told about Japanese American life -462- before World War II, and John Okada's No-No Boy (1957) portrayed a Japanese American who refused to be drafted. Tan and Kingston are the first Asian American novelists to achieve great popular and critical acclaim. Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989) consists of related stories and anecdotes told by different female characters who are all united by their Chinese background and by their membership in the same social club.
Usually classified as nonfiction but including many fictional elements, Kingston's Woman Warrior (1976) and China Men (1980) had earned for her recognition as 'America's first major writer of Chinese ancestry.' With Tripmaster Monkey (1989), Kingston established herself as one of the American West's leading novelists. Naming her 1960s protagonist Wittman Ah Sing (in a witty allusion to that most American of poets, Walt Whitman), Kingston tells the story of a young Chinese American college graduate who refuses to conform. Like Kesey's McMurphy, Wittman first clashes with authority, loses his job, then tries to set up a community within an advanced industrial system that splinters communities. Unlike McMurphy, Wittman has more than his natural intelligence upon which to rely. He also draws upon all he learned as an English major at UC Berkeley and all he knows about China's centuries-old cultural tradition.
During one of the novel's first scenes, Wittman reads out loud to fellow bus passengers, and he then imagines himself starting a tradition of such readings on all public transportation, leading 'to a job as a reader riding the railroads throughout the West,' regaling passengers with works by John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, Jack Kerouac, Mark Twain, John Muir, Jack London, Wallace Stegner, and John Fante. The world of Tripmaster Monkey consists not only of character and place but also of all that the main character reads and thinks. Kingston has said she will write a sequel depicting an older and more mature Wittman, so we may eventually see how the contemporary West looks to an Asian American who has learned from the past, his own as well as humanity's.
A century after the official closing of the frontier in 1890, the novel of the West needs that more mature vision promised by Kingston. Notwithstanding that need, the western part of the United States now has a rich and varied tradition of regional fiction. But because of its great variety, few generalizations can be made about that tra-463- dition. For example, Thomas Pynchon's long-awaited fourth novel, Vineland (1990), is set in the West, but the characters' minds seem more an amalgam of mass popular myths and stereotypes than individual perspectives shaped by a particular place. But if Lewis Thomas is right in saying that
