Louis Owens: Writing Land and Legacy ed. by Joe Lockard and A. Robert Lee

Abstract

Reviewed by: Louis Owens: Writing Land and Legacy ed. by Joe Lockard and A. Robert Lee Steven B. Sexton Joe Lockard and A. Robert Lee, eds. Louis Owens: Writing Land and Legacy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019. 328 pp. Hardcover, $75.00. In the introduction to Louis Owens: Literary Reflections and His Life and Work (University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), editor Jacquelyn Kilpatrick relates a story of introducing Louis Owens at a conference, mentioning his various literary and scholarly accolades. When she asked Owens if she had failed to mention anything, he replies, "I'm the former crosscut saw champion of the Prescott National Forest." Kilpatrick credits his humorous response on the complexity he saw in "literature, culture, and life" (3). As anyone who is familiar with Owens's work can attest, that complexity is manifest in his creative, critical, and autobiographical works. Seventeen years after Owens's passing, Joe Lockard and A. Robert Lee offer us a new collection of essays, Louis Owens: Writing Land and Legacy, which offers fresh and updated perspectives on his works. This volume was undertaken "with an understanding that diffuse Owens scholarship needed a renewed center that brought together both younger and older scholars" (7). The collection stands as testimony to that complexity and to the perseverance of his work. Louis Owens: Writing Land and Legacy includes thirteen critical chapters and two poems. The critical pieces offer a wide range of subjects, including those often associated with Owens such as "mixed-blood" identity and hybridity, as well as other topics such as transnationalism, anticolonialism, and eco-gothic criticism. The poems, Diane Glancy's "Letter to Louis" and Kimberly Blaeser's "Of Nalusachito and the Course of Rivers," act as a nice ending to the collection. As a way of corralling such diversity, the editors organize the critical writings into three parts: "Owens and the World," "Owens and California," and "The Novels." The three chapters in the first section offer a "tour d'horizon" of Owens's works. The chapters are each written by one of the editors, and Paul Whitehouse. Lee analyzes how memory operates throughout Owens's novels, while Whitehouse's eco-gothic reading examines the Euramerican concept of the wilderness. Lockard analyzes the anticolonial themes inherent in Owens's works, particularly noteworthy since this aspect of his work is severely overlooked. His goal, however, does not seem to be convincing the reader that Owens's works are [End Page 300] anticolonial but instead assumes it as a given. The critiques leveled at Owens, particularly those from literary nationalists, may have rendered Owens's works as apolitical, at least connotatively. Lockard's assumption reestablishes that political/ anticolonial nature and encourages other critics to explore how Owens's anticolonialism intersects with and deviates from other anticolonial works. "Owens and California" centers on Owens's relationship to California. Chapter authors include Chris Lalonde, David Carlson, and Billy J. Stratton; all three reference one of Owens's essays, "Where Things Can Happen: California and Writing." They also make reference to Owens's criticism of John Steinbeck regarding his literary erasure of California Indigenes. While one could argue that Owens considered multiple places home, Lalonde explores how California haunts Owens's works, and vice versa. Carlson argues that Owens's work is foundational to the emerging field of California Indigenous literature and asserts that the works contribute to Indigenous modernism. Stratton uses Owens's work on Steinbeck to discuss Owens's development of a post-Indian aesthetics. All three chapters offer a rounded and nuanced understanding of Owens's ambivalent relationship to the Golden State. The third section, "The Novels," is the largest, offering seven essays that cover all of Owens's novels. The contributors include James Mackay, Alan Velie, David Moore, Birgit Däwes, Cathy Covell Waegner, Joseph Coulombe, and John Gamber. These essays offer a variety of literary methods to discuss Owens's novels. Some focus a particular critical lens on a singular novel; for example, Coulombe examines the humor in Nightland, while Gamber articulates Dark River's nuanced understanding of citizenship and belonging. Some critics use non-Indigenous texts as a point of comparison, which seems appropriate considering Owens's penchant for...