Hardscrub by Lionel G. Garcia

Abstract

182 Western American Literature people left out of their own time, caught up in their own memories, and inventors of their own destinies. Only occasionally does his spokesperson, Calamity, come forth to abuse their inflated notions of the west with brutal truth. “All this is silly,” she says, “The big adventure’s over. It’s over and that’s that.” Laced with the literary style and sense of irony that always marks McMurtry’sbest work, this newest offering far surpasses his most recent books in quality and poignancy. His acute sense of who these people were and what they were about comes flooding through each page, and in the sections given over to Calamity’s letters to her daughter, her self-portrait and confessions go to the heart of what the American west truly was. If readers have not yet turned to McMurtry or know him only by virtue of his early books or, perhaps, Lonesome Dove, they would be well served to take up this volume. Styled with tenderness and gentle humor, Buffalo Girls ispossibly the best thing McMurtry has published in twenty years. Once finished, it makes me want more, and at the same time, it makes me glad that it is in this form that the “final word” on the legends of the American west ispresented. CLAY REYNOLDS University of North Texas Hardscrub. By Lionel G. Garcia. (Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1990. 300 pages, $9.00.) Hardscrub is a triumph of substance over style, a tough book about the hard life of an Okie kid from Texas, with a no-good bastard of a father to make his life miserable, forever. In fact, the world of the kid is so downbeat when the book starts that it takes effort for the reader to adjust to the bleakness of it. Many of the characters are memorable grotesques, and often humorous. One is reminded of Gogol’s “Dead Souls” or, in the southern vein, Flannery O’Connor’s “Wise Blood.” Hardscrub fits into the tradition of tough literature from the frontier— though it isn’t about cowboys fighting Indians over land. This is western literature of hard, modern, urban times, about a Wild West character reincar­ nated in post-World War II Texas and his unhappy influence on his sensitive son of the same name, Jimmy. Jimmy sees his father’s evil and survives it with the help of kind adults and by his own wit, yet he never escapes the poison of supreme selfishness his old man spreads around. Not the formula genre writing that comes out of New York City, Hardscrub is an attempt to say something original, and it succeeds. It does not follow the dictates of a formal plot, but instead seeks to create a memorable world in an impressionistic manner. It does, though, fit into the tradition of the serious novel of initiation. I’m reminded of the work of James T. Farrell Reviews 183 in “Studs Lonigan” and the Depression-era novel, “Call it Sleep,” by Henry Roth, of the Jewish kid growing up on the East Side of New York City, both of which move slowly and subtly as the young protagonists encounter the hurdles of a hard life. Garcia catches the consciousness of a child being exposed to sex and violence, romance and tragedy. The child witnesses the brutalization of his brother Richard by his no-good dad, who wrings his brother’s ears into cauli­ flower and makes a criminal out of him after helping to cause the death of their younger sister. The mature, successful, but still scarred protagonist finds out in brutal detail how his brother saw their mother cheating in bed on his dad and realizes that she, too, because his dad did not care for her, helped make his brother into that criminal. Garcia uses the slightly crude technique of having people tell their stories in dialogue overheard by the young child or spoken directly to him. The style fits the world it tries to depict, though a smoother blending of narration, description and dialogue at times would have given more verisimilitude to some scenes. Sometimes we get pages of straight dialogue, paragraphs of straight description...