Death and the Good Life by Richard Hugo

Abstract

Reviews 363 obvious relish for life, an undercurrent of glee. There is a free, unfenceable spirit here. Probably no western writer since Mark Twain has been funny in quite this way. Abbey loves good country, good food, friends, unbossed time — the old, normal, human range. This is behind everything he says, and we recognize it instinctively, genetically. Down the River makes one of the clearest statements of the wilderness corollary to the Turner thesis I have seen. If open land made Americans what they are, then what becomes of them when it’s gone? “Europe was saved,” Abbey writes, “from becoming a permanent prisonhouse by the open­ ing up of America. (And the forcible displacement of America’s original inhabitants.) But suppose we in America surrender our last remnants of wilderness to the demands of industrialism?” For Abbey, a most disturbing rhetorical question. His answer goes far beyond the meliorist accommoda­ tions of such conservationists as René Dubos (the essay containing these thoughts on wilderness is called “Thus I Reply to René Dubos”), into a radical, Abbeyan association of wild country, political freedom, and a full emotional and intellectual life — an ideal state which Abbey says could be called civilization. THOMAS J. LYON, Utah State University Death and the Good Life. By Richard Hugo. (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981. 215 pages, $10.95.) For a first novel by an acclaimed poet, this is a lot of fun. The initial crime is imagined as occurring just after the victim snags two small rainbow trout at Rainbow Lake, in northwest Montana. And the plot, as involved with convolutions as the internal rhymes and rhythms of Hugo at his best poetic form, twists and turns and digresses across the Northwest from Plains (several allusions to Jimmy Carter), Montana to Portland, Oregon. And the hero, A1 “Mush Heart” Barnes, is, every inch of him, a good soul (as well as a good sole). The plot may be a bit bizarre (a frog farm in Albania?) but the characters are good and A1 Barnes is a very likeable hero. There is also a distinct poetic dimension to this detective story, from poetic colorings (“Sedge was receding in the lake now that the surface water was cooling and the big rainbows were coming up”) to poetic surprises (“Sometimes I’ve wondered why women don’t have a skid row. It’s like men reserved destitu­ tion and defeat for their exclusive use.”) to poetic slummings (“ ‘Yes. I wanted to be a poet.’ ‘Really? Cod, there are so many these days. Isn’t that a funny thing for a cop to want to be?’”) and poetic name droppings (“ ‘I see you’re reading William Stafford. . . . Do you like his poems?’”). Are there poet cops in Portland? Do nice men with kindly faces in exclusive clubs really read William Stafford? At least for the purposes of this 364 Western American Literature poet turned detective, the whole world comes together and has a reasonably good time — as good as can be had, with the bodies piling up and the crimes receding into a prehistoric, pre-liberal age of young and brutal cruelty. You just can’t read this detective story in the same way you would read a Christie or a Spillane or Hammett or Sayers—it just won’t work. The reason for the difference is not the poetic colorings nor the plot nor the characters— it’s A1 Barnes himself, who either keeps readers smiling or feel­ ing a somewhat mild disgruntlement. A1 “Mush Heart” Barnes is Sam Spade dug up, patched together, given a love for good cooking and a new eye for the poetic details in characters’ lives and in specific settings, as well as a big soft heart that wants everyone to live a long time and have a good time doing it. He is no hard-nosed, no-nonsense, “gray-mattered” steel-trap mind of indefatigible logic, nor womanizing cynic. “Mush Heart” Barnes’s heart is what leads him on — neither Poirot nor Eliot he. When a rookie cop, Barnes even had trouble getting his bureaucratic quota of speeding tickets. His Seattle superiors therefore gave him — astute superiors! — a police-community relations...