Sarah Canary by Karen Joy Fowler, and: Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand by Ursula K. Le Guin

Abstract

184 WesternAmerican Literature tells a good story, though his thematic range is somewhat limited. With its use of the West as an arena for moral action and new beginnings, Language in theBlood holds the greater interest for readers of Western American Literature. The novel also deserves praise, by the way, for the wealth of birding lore and information that Nelson weaves seamlessly into the narrative. PAUL HADELLA Southern Oregon State College Sarah Canary.ByKarenJoy Fowler. (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1991. 290 pages, $21.95.) Searoad: Chronicles ofKlatsand. By Ursula K. Le Guin. (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991. 193 pages, $20.00.) These are realistic works from authors most frequently described as science fiction writers. Ursula K. Le Guin is already a literary Garth Brooks of sorts; her classics The Left Hand ofDarkness and the Earthsea series are enjoyed by those who otherwise avoid science fiction and fantasy. But she is only infrequently counted among the best contemporary writers regardless of genre identifica­ tion. Searoadmay bring her the wider attention her fine writing deserves. Karen Joy Fowler, whose short stories are collected in Artificial Things, also began by publishing science fiction. She brings from the genre a sense of the limitlessness of fiction. These authors may have established their reputations by inventing other worlds, but in Searoad and Sarah Canary they are firmly grounded in the people and places of the Northwest. Sarah Canary is Fowler’s quixotic and engaging first novel. Set in Washing­ ton Territory in 1873, this is a story of the Old West told by its outcasts: Chin Ah Kin, the shanghaied railworker; B.J., an escapee from an insane asylum; Adelaide, the suffragette who lectures on female orgasm; and Harold, a survivor of Andersonville who thinks himself immortal. Fowler portrays them all with sympathy for their isolation and admiration for their sometimes visionary, sometimes lunatic insights. The object of their mutual quest is the monstrous, mysterious Sarah Canary. Unwilling or unable to explain herself, she becomes a kind of mirror reflecting the bias and cultural conditioning of those who view her. Contrasted against this likeable and ultimately very wise collection of misfits are briefhistorical essays that lambaste the moral and intellectual leaders of the time. The juxtapositions effectively, if perhaps too obviously, raise the question ofwhere sanity really lies, whose perception is really to be believed. Searoad is also about the people who settled the West. This collection of stories spans about 100 years in the history of Klatsand, a northern Oregon coastal town that doesn’t quite exist on the map. In these deceptively quiet Reviews 185 stories, Le Guin writes about the people who find in Klatsand a place to visit, live, die, or recover from the death of a loved one. Her focus is less on events than on people, and as in Fowler’s novel, we see some of the same characters from different points of view. Le Guin also makes main characters of those otherwise marginalized in the existing body of literature—housewives, wait­ resses, junior college professors. But the stories are linked not so much by recurrent characters as by the ocean, which courses beneath the narrative layer with a restless, powerful rhythm. Le Guin most frequently examines the rela­ tionships between generations of women, as in “Quoits” and the lovely “Hand, Cup, Shell.” The book’s luminescent centerpiece, “Hernes,” is a long, non­ linear narrative about four generations ofwomen in a Klatsand family and is as good as any fiction Le Guin has written. While Searoadand Sarah Canaryare quite different in style and content, they similarly reflect recent feminist and New Historicist thought. For instance, in both the authors playwith and overturn literary expectations. Fowler hilariously subverts chivalric traditions by making the object of the chase in Sarah Canary grotesquely ugly, an incarnation of European intellectual conceptions of woman as uncivilized and nonsensical. The quest that moves the plot falls apart when Sarah Canary vanishes, much to the guilty reliefof those who pursue her. Throughout Searoad, but particularly in “Hernes,” Le Guin reshapes our sense of language and narrative, frequently adopting what she calls “the mother tongue”—the language of the household as opposed to the language...