Not Working by George Szanto

Abstract

328 Western American Literature It is time to light out for the Territory ourselves — to Austin, say, and Max Westbrook’s Confrontations. Recalling the author’s many scholarly services for the literature of the American West, most of us would resist labeling his talent new. But it is good nonetheless to hear a familiar voice of sense and sensibility striking more personal notes. It is no surprise that this voice is witty, sincere, unpretentious, frequently self-deprecating and teasing, but just as frequently urgent. What Westbrook confronts in his little book is the self in all its contraries, alternately beautiful, tawdry, violent, or sweet. He is particularly impressive when he beards bestial human nature (“the universal grizzly,” he calls it) in its lair, the poet quixotically armed in just his humor. It is sufficient. It won’t do you any good to hide. I know you’re there, smell your breath in mine, hear you dragging boxed feet at all hours almost see your beady eyes watching. Your protean talents notwithstanding one day at the office and you’d come unglued. So here we stand, a little abashed, with our universal grizzlies tamed by the switch of bureaucracy. This poet knows when not to embellish, when to reduce imagery to crisp honesty of voice. There are equally crisp, if darker notes elsewhere in the book as Westbrook invites us to confrontation: “Tell me I am not alone in this world.” He isn’t. We’ve come, too. WILLIAM GEYER Augustana College, South Dakota Not Working. By George Szanto. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982. 256 pages, $12.95; Avon Books of Canada, 1984, $3.95.) George Szanto has achieved a new Western in his first novel, Not Work­ ing. Essentially an outsider in the tradition of Samuel Clemens and Owen Wister, Szanto has written the Western of his contemporaries. Not Working begins with the question “Has it been said that killing a man can start up new life?” In the Western tradition, here we have the story of a man who has left his previous life behind. He is Joe Levy, a sensitive city cop anguished over killing a kid in the streets of San Diego by accident. He leaves California for the town of Dobie, Wyoming. Why Dobie? Because Helly, Levy’s wife, has finally finished graduate school after many years as a housewife and found a job at Dobie College, the Wyoming town’s main industry. Reviews 329 Now, the traditional roles reverse. Levy, no longer willing to work as a policeman, becomes househusband and full-time father to their two children. His concerns become centered on domestic life. Suddenly his daughter’s boyfriend’s father is killed in a dubious car crash (modeled on the Karen Silkwood plutonium safety case). Levy instinctively, reluctantly, becomes involved, his private investigation uncovering a sinister takeover of coal resources in eastern Wyoming. The action picks up, generat­ ing the classic Western showdown of a family with courage contending with both ruthless enemies and spineless allies. But remember, this is the 1970s. The climax — filled with the reversals that characterize contemporary life — surprises and satisfies the reader. Then Szanto invokes the traditional frontier anticlimax technique, which Mark Twain singled out as a distinctive feature of the new American art of story telling, “the slurring of the point.” A dazzling final paragraph — apparently simply about trout fishing — synthesizes the entire novel, and with another reversal calls into question the reader’s whole experience with the text. The book’s major achievement is as a novel of place and character, a social Western that accurately pictures the mountains, the sage, the wind, and the people who now live in what was the unsettled frontier. The critical battles in today’s West are not between Indians and encroaching settlers, not over water sources or gold, not about range rights of cattlemen, sheepherders or farmers. The major conflicts and tensions today are based on mineral development and exploitation. This is the post-OPEC era. Szanto is a sensitive writer with great strength in building characters and their interactions. The novel becomes a family story, its richest narra­ tive exploring the relationship between Joe Levy as...