Living on the Edge of America: At Home on the Texas-Mexico Border by Robert Lee Maril

Abstract

260 'WesternAmerican Literature that the values ofcontemporary California are atoddswith their own moral and religious convictions, best demonstrated by Oca’sexample. While focusing largely on the ebb and flow of the Tathams’ financial, religious, and personal fortunes, then, Morgan’sbook becomes in fact a capti­ vating, panoramic survey ofCalifornia history since the Depression. Ultimately, the narrative provides a stimulating and sometimes troubling vision of what became of Steinbeck’sJoads and their contemporaries when the floodwaters threatening their barn refuge yielded at last to the California sun. CHRISTOPHER S. BUSCH Hillsdale College Living on theEdge ofAmerica: At Home on the Texas-Mexico Border. ByRobert Lee Maril. (College Station: TexasA&MUniversity Press, 1992. 180 pages, $24.50.) For those unfamiliar with the lower Rio Grande Valley, Maril offers an unflinching personal view of the landscape and the social make-up ofthe area. The pervasive heat of the Valley, palmetto bugs, the neighbor’s mongrel dogs, endless glasses of iced tea, and spicy regional food permeate Maril’s descrip­ tions. He also takes great care in pointing out the racial and economic concerns of and conflicts which exist between Mexicans, Mexican-Americans, AfricanAmericans , and Anglos. Yet the book is a collection of short narratives which focus on particular incidents, not racial or economic allegories; other stories focus on individuals, not on types. Maril’s stories offer a range of characters, which collectively make up hisviewof the Valley. Perhaps the only drawback to the book is that sometimes these narratives (thirty-one, excluding the preface and epilogue) suffer from brevity, and Iwas leftwanting more detail. I discourage anyone from reading this bookwho islookingfor an extended Frommer’s guide. It is not travel literature; it is a book about place—about Maril’s and his family’s process ofunderstanding and inhabiting place, as well as about howplace begins to inhabit them. In the preface Maril claims the book ... is about sharing a life with those who are very poor and with those who are affluent and isolated from the povertywhich surrounds them; it isabout howI, and sometimes they, changed asaresult. In this effort I have not attempted to artificially separate my life from those whom I describe. The strength of Living on theEdge ofAmericalies in Maril’s clear understanding of how both those whom he has met and that which he has seen change the narrative perspective of the text at the same time they are filtered through that perspective. Maril concludes, “The Valley, every living and inanimate part of it that had touched me, had long since fused to my living tissues. . . .The Valley wasforeverwith me, a part ofmyheart.”LivingontheEdgeofAmerican a splendid Reviews 261 book about the lower Rio Grande Valley, about those who live there, and about Maril’slearning to live there. DAVID TAYLOR University ofTennessee, Knoxville New WritersofthePurpleSage:An Anthology ofContemporary Western Writing. Edited by Russell Martin. (NewYork: Penguin Books, 1992. 381 pages, $12.00.) Russell Martin’s second Purple Sage anthology (the first, also a Penguin imprint, appeared in 1984) proposes that seriouswriting ofthe interior West be called a “sagebrush school of American literature.” But it’s more than a school—it’spart of a larger enterprise, a western literary renaissance. Sooner or later we’ll be swallowing that big honorific. The West already has in Frank Waters its Melville, its Faulkner. It has scores of twentieth-century masters— among them Cather, Austin,Jeffers, Steinbeck, Guthrie, Clark, Stegner, Abbey and Raymond Carver (more open Westerner than enclosed minimalist)—and hundreds of“new”writerswho are coming to national attention through majorpress publications and through the efforts of various critics, editors, and an­ thologists, including Martin. “Renaissance”or not, New Writers ofthePurple Sage presents twenty-three prose selections that attest to the vitality and diversity of western writers and to the continuing presence ofmasters. Masterful isthe word for at least nine selections here: short stories (Joanne Greenberg, “Offering Up”;Rudolfo A.Anaya, “Iliana ofthe Pleasure Dreams”); narrative excerpts (James Welch, from The Indian Lawyer, N. Scott Momaday, from The Ancient Child', Gretel Ehrlich, from Drinking Dry Clouds; Deirdre McNamer, from Rima in the Weeds; Tim Sandlin, from SkippedParts);and mem­ oirs (William Kittredge, “Home”;Charles Bowden, “Desierto”). Also livelyare a story by Ron Carlson...