The House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind , and: The Way of a Boy: A Memoir of Java (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews267 Living on the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer, edited by Hilda Raz. Persea Books, NewYork, 1999. 285 pages, $25.95. Poets and writers often use their own Uves as source material, but not always in personal terms. So when LuciUe Clifton, MarUyn Hacker, Maxine Kumin, AUcia Ostriker, and fourteen other exciting writers ofpoetry, fiction, journaUsm, and scholarship teU readers what reaUy happened to them when they had breast cancer, it is an event worth noting. The book includes poems, personal essays, shaped journals, and interviews in a satisfying mix of lyricism , humor, information, and self-revelation. CoUectively, these voices offer an alternative to fear—whether it's LuciUe CUfton's poetry asking, "what is the splendor of one breast/on one woman?"; Maxine Kumin relating her struggles with a doctor intent on usurping her decisions; Annette WiUiams Jaffee's brave efforts to break the cycle of genetic legacy that caused her to lose her mother and aunts so young: "My mother was dying in the front bedroom but I was on the porch eating those tart green grapes"; Alicia Ostriker's "Scenes from a Mastectomy," which depicts a marriage handfing a mastectomy ; Mimi Schwartz's misadventures at a "Reach for Recovery" conference ; Pamela Post's empathy to rock in the middle of the night with the woman in the next hospital bed, feeUng her pain "as much as the surgeon's knife"—and many more. Not aU the explorations are personal, though. There is an informative interview with Dr. Susan Love, the breast cancer activist, andJudith HaU s piece on Fanny Burney's mastectomy without anesthesia in 1811. The book's title, says editor Hilda Raz, refers to clean margins that those with cancer hope for, indicating no cancer spread. But life is on the margins , and the question is, how weU do we manage this? Very well—is the inspiring message ofthese women writers who ffll in, as Raz says, the "margin of missing literature [that] surrounds breast cancer." Elizabeth Templeman With my memory for detail ever more unreliable, and my love of fine prose fairly constant, I believe I could spend the rest of my Ufe rereading selections from a dozen or so favorite books. Among them are two comingof -age memoirs which, despite their differing circumstances, evoke, for me, a famiUar sweetness and terror, a secret longing and secret pain. 268Fourth Genre The House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind by Ivan Doig. HarcourtBrace , 1987. 314 pages, paperback $13.00. In the 1960s Doig saw the lifestyle ofhis family—herding sheep over the hardscrabble plains of Montana—disappearing. So he set out to capture its haunting landscapes and its bold, hard-living, and utterly memorable cast of characters. This is oral history, taken down with respectful precision. It aims to preserve a richly inventive language of cussing and the ingenuity, crushing work, and high stakes ofthe transient life. Its cadence is as quirky as the language is powerful. One section on lambing includes multiple-page paragraphs : lambing was work without respite. In one ofa chain ofblessings, the chüd ofirregular schooling discovered a stash of abandoned magazines, material to feed his imagination and budding love of words: I read right through whatever shone dark on the snowfield pages ... as an Eskimo who had never before seen a movie might watch the newsreel and then the cartoon and then the feature film without ever knowing to separate them in his mind, simply letting himself be taken with the habited flow of flashing images. . . . His mother died when he was six and Doig describes how he reached back "along my father's teUings" to find her "in the oldest shadows" but the book is finaUy a tribute to his father, Charles Doig, and the maternal grandmother , Bessie Ringer, who formed an uneasy aUiance for the raising ofthe boy. The Way of a Boy: A Memoir ofJava by Ernest HiUen. Penguin, 1995. 314 pages, paperback, $10.70 (throughAmazon.com). In this, the first of two memoirs, HiUen teUs about the Japanese imprisonment ofDutch and EngUsh famflies Uving in Indonesia. The story is one ofthose ripples ofhistory that to my limited knowledge isn't much remembered . I...