A Bright Tragic Thing: A Tale of Civil War Texas by L. D. Clark

Abstract

Reviews 185 Etilogy for a Brown Angel. By Lucha Corpi. (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1992. 189 pages, $17.95.) Opening during the final violent hours of the 1970 National Chicano Moratorium as the protagonist, Gloria Demasco, discovers a child’s defiled body, Eulogy chronicles Demasco’s eighteen-year search for the murderer. As Demasco’s search moves from the political hotbed of East Los Angeles to its conclusion in the pastoral California wine country, Corpi’s novel loses all of its initial claim to political significance. The reader will be disappointed to find that this is a novel of missed opportunities. Corpi seems to lose sight of her original project after the opening chapters as the novel’s focus shifts from the geographical and political “scene” of the m urder to the powerful, but troubled, family of the victim. Corpi’s initial chapters strongly suggest a correspondence between the m urder and the riot­ ing in the midst of which the body appears. To this end, she alludes to Oscar Acosta, writer, attorney, and highly visible Chicano-rights activist, and journalist Ruben Salazar, who was killed by the L. A. police during the 1970 rioting. Corpi juxtaposes the child’s death with that of Salazar, the news of which recalled Acosta from voluntary exile in Acapulco and motivated him to write his influen­ tial 1973 work, The Revolt ofthe Cockroach People. But Corpi reneges, dropping the novel set up in the opening chapters and focusing instead upon the fragmenting Cisneros family. The evil, we find, is not social, but familial. However, with its mixed European and Mexican ancestry, its history of self-victimization and infighting, this family seems from certain very oblique angles to suggest the inflammatory social and racial dynamic dropped earlier. This does not pan out: like the novel’s political thrust, the Cisneros family’s metaphysical significance is never realized. Though Eulogy is a good read, one cannot but feel that itjust isn’t finished. Besides the novel’s political angle, which she seems to have tried and aban­ doned, Corpi has overdeveloped certain minor characters while merely sketch­ ing in others (Gloria’s husband and daughter for example) whose demands weigh heavily upon the mind of the protagonist. One feels upon finishing that Eulogy is but a draft or two away from something very good. BftlK LUKENS Princeton University A'Bright Tragic Thing: A Tale of Civil War Texas. By L. D. Clark. (El Paso: Cinco Puntos Press. 302 pages, $14.95.) L. D. Clark’s novel about “The Great Hanging” in Gainesville, Texas in 1862, is related through the recollections of Todd Blair, son of one of the condemned men who died as a result of Confederate actions to break up a “Peace Party Conspiracy” in several north central Texas counties. Todd is now 186 Western American Literature an old man, still embittered against the fanatics who permitted mob rule to kill forty-four of the citizens of Milcourt, the fictionalized setting. His sentimental and emotionally laden account details much of what happened in historical Gainesville, although Clark bends history and factual detail to fit the fictional circumstances, sometimes leaving his story at sea with regard to probability. The centerpiece of the story, for example, is Todd’s quick, sexy, and improbable love affair with the head Rebel’s niece. The elder Todd describes every detail of his emotional trauma, sometimes giving a second-by-second account of what he felt, why he felt it, what he might have felt otherwise, etc. Clark’s attempt to approximate period vernacular renders many figures as caricatures in both their villainy and tender nostalgic remembrance. Todd’s inexorable analysis of every detail is often tedious, as is his self-recrimination, agitation, and passion. He witnesses horrendous catastro­ phe with calm acceptance compared to his anguish over social faux pas and verbal missteps. Further, Todd’s incessant and vicious attacks on the Confederacy, although possibly accurate in reflection of the anti-secessionist’s position, is unrelieved by any nobility of purpose on the part of the Rebels, nor any tragic sense of misguided and overzealous prosecution of law in a confused and terrible time. In Todd’s opinion, Confederates...