The Life and Adventures of John Muir by James Mitchell Clarke

Abstract

Reviews 63 use the rhythms of the road to drown out the moral claims of underage female victims of sexual exploitation in a misguided effort to avoid senti­ mentalizing their plight. The plot takes off when Sam picks up footloose seventeen-year-old Katy Daniels in his Chevy wagon at the Bonneville Salt Flats highway rest station and sidewinds its way through a variety of Sunbelt set pieces (wayside stops in diners; encounters with real cowboys and religious funda­ mentalists) on the way to its dubious “climax” in a motel in Winnemucca, Nevada. There, all too inevitably, Sam and Katy sleep together. Sam has been unable to mourn the recent death of his daughter Julianna because of guilt over his use of her, and Katy’s youth allows Sam to get his head together by re-enacting his past incestuous behavior with a surrogate. Doty strains for an uplifting impact from this hooey plot turn, which hinges on being able to convince the reader that Sam is not just sexually victimizing another teenager. Doty’s ragged characterization of Katy is slanted to por­ tray her as a consenting child-woman, but actually she has been abandoned by her affluent Berkeley family. Equally clunky are the depiction of Sam’s lower middle class environs of Albany, California, and a bad tempered, morally superior foray into Katy’s suburban background. Doty (who was born in Tooele, Utah, and now resides in Oakland, California) does a good, essentially comic job of filtering the Nevada desert landscape and the kitsch shrines of strip-developed roadside culture through Sam’s jabbing, out-of-control emotions. But her exposition of Sam’s crisis itself — how his unresolved feelings for Julianna relate to what he felt years ago as the overwhelmed son of poor Yugoslavian immigrants to Montana — is programmatic and tinged with unintentionally camp pathos. Despite these serious limitations, there are still the makings of a tour-deforce in the way Doty pits Sam’s ethnic subculture against the WASP myth of the Old West, including the conventions of the road novel. Sam’s real friends along the road are mostly small businessmen of Mediterranean descent, and Doty senses the bracing comic hauteur of these ethnic under­ dogs (Greeks and Italians as well as Slavs) as they view our West and its embarrassing contemporary fall from the American myth. JANIS HELBERT, Pacific Palisades, California The Life and Adventures of John Muir. By James Mitchell Clarke. (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1980. 324 pages, $14.95.) In this biography, it is clearly evident that Mr. Clarke has used as his chief source of information and research Linnie Marsh Wolfe’s Pulitzer prize-winning biography, Son of the Wilderness, first published in 1945. He does not emphasize the intricacies of the Muir family relationships as Mrs. Wolfe does, but instead, stresses the more dramatic events. Being a 64 Western American Literature journalist, in true journalistic style he capitalizes on the many fearless adventures of John Muir’s life. He skillfully creates an appropriate and colorful background that highlights each event. Occasionally, in his enthusi­ asm to vividly portray a heroic adventure, he exaggerates to the extent of making the incident unbelievable, as is true in his relating the episode of Rev. S. Hall Young and John Muir on Glenora Peak in Alaska. Mr. Clarke relates an anecdote of Muir’s having had a more than friendly interest in a young woman of Julian, California, a Mary Jane Talley. Some gifts, a scrapbook herbarium and a collage of a woodland scene, that Muir supposedly gave her, were deposited in the San Diego Historical Society by her daughter in 1939. Although the gifts are likely ones that Muir could have given to a girl he liked, the anecdote cannot be accepted as truth until some evidence establishes the fact that Muir was in Julian and spent some time there. To date, the records do not support this. Furthermore, a Muir scholar has examined the writing in the scrapbook, and firmly believes that the writing is not that of John Muir. Mr. Clarke makes the rather common error in referring to the Sierra Nevada as “the Sierras.” The Sierra Nevada range is...