Solar Storms by Linda Hogan

Abstract

Reviews 301 book, Caught Inside, initially seems merely a re-visioning of his first: we’re still in California, only now we’re at the beach, and instead of climbing, we’re surfing. To the economist, he’s simply substituted one nonproductive avocation for another. For the reader of literature, he’s evolved significantly as a writer: he’s retained all the charm of the memoir (and Lighting Out was nothing if not charming) and combined it with a carefully studied sense of natural history and an even more astutely observed sense of cultural history. Its subtitle announces his strategy: a surfer’s year on the California coast. But his first sentence more precisely stakes out his territory: “Unless you’re a strolling natural­ ist by nature, or a farmer or commercial fisherman or ranger, you need a medium, a game, a pleasure principle that turns knowing your home into passionate scholarship.” The neat trick that Duane has accomplished here is that his “passionate scholarship” is more passionate than scholarly, more natural than a mere excuse for writing a book. In a sense, Duane is ever the novitiate, learning to read the design of his tools (surf­ boards) and the shores of the Pacific, its swells and fauna, the physics of its waves, and the social mores of its inhabitants. But here Duane is not so self-absorbed as a simple memoirist. Sure, he’s a participant, and that ties him nicely to the world he describes. But he also accomplishes what all great writers do: he connects both himself and the reader to the larger world. We learn the history of surfing, its peculiar (to most of us) migration to the continent from the East, its historical context, and, finally, why it mat­ ters. In the great white shark the surfer understands the unknowable wildness of the primeval, natural world. In the swell of the waves is the unchartable, unmapped West of the pioneer. Near the end of the book Duane notes: “It’s unsettling to discover how hard-won is real understanding of place, how much it demands stillness and time; real time, daily visitations.” This epiphanic moment is not in the least tinged with a sense of accom­ plishment or success; rather it’s an admission of humility in the face of nature, a reminder that few of us truly know our homes. We should be grateful to Duane for performing so well the writer’s task, for so elo­ quently reporting to those of us on the outside his hard-earned view from the “inside,” this view of Californiafrom the west, from off the shores of the Pacific. D av id S te v e n s o n W ester n Illin o is Un ive rsity Solar Storms. By Linda Hogan. (New York: Scribner, 1995. 351 pages, $22.00.) Like Linda Hogan’s first novel, Mean Spirit, Solar Storms is a compelling story about material dispossession, the struggle for cultural continuity, and the wisdom and strength of women. Hogan’s long-awaited second novel is informed by her poetic sensibility and her spiritual connection to the earth. The native world of Solar Storms is “a dense soup of love,” where fish talk and spiders listen to thoughts. Entering that ancient and alien world is a tough-talking ward of the state, Angel Wing. A survivor of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, Angel longs for family connection and for fusion with nature, a state she knows is ultimately unattainable: “What I really wanted none of us would ever have. I wanted an unbroken line between me and the past.” 302 Western American Literature Seeking to recover a part of that lost past, she travels north by canoe with three newly discovered maternal ancestors—Bush, Agnes Iron, and Dora Rouge—whom she locates in a tribal community in the Boundary Waters canoe area of northern Minnesota. Eventually, she succeeds in finding her birth mother and tribal home, the land of the Fat Eaters, only to find both mother and motherland as scarred by abuse as her own face. Angel hopes to recover her tribal self through the painful reconstruction of her per­ sonal past but instead...