The Sweetwater by Jean Rikhoff

Abstract

Reviews 371 Basically humorous entertainment, Mistr Jory nonetheless is deeply concerned with the question “How should a man live?” and the novel suc­ ceeds in blending its serious moral overtones with the comic routines of the ingenuous and always hungry teenager. Under the influence of the alcoholic Reverend Russell and a few jolts of brandy, Jory does forswear his guns but only for a short time. As with many other westerns, the pressures in this novel indicate to the hero that in order to survive in and help make safe a lawless and violent land, Good must go armed and ready. Finally, in its own way, Mistr Jory follows a classic pattern in American fiction. Jory is, at the opening of the book, man alone in the wilderness. He then becomes involved in complex and mysterious human situations which, though often painful and frustrating, enable him to see himself more clearly. Then, as complexities are resolved — through violence — Jory is alone again, ready to continue his journey. Told in the first person by a relatively innocent young man, and dealing as it does with questions of morality and permissible violence, Mistr Jory goes beyond the vague frontier of category fiction to become a well-executed novel about growing up in America. JACK HAFER, Richmond, Virginia The Sweetwater. By Jean RikhofF. (New York: The Dial Press, 1976. 406 pages, $8.95.) Jean Rikhoff returns for a third time in The Sweetwater to the related but very different families, the Butteses and the Raymonds of the Adirondack country of New York. In this novel, however, unlike the earlier Buttes Landing and One of the Raymonds, the scene is the West in 1876. The cousins, John Buttes and Mason Raymond Buttes, effectively contrasted as the doer and the dreamer, have come to Independence where they meet Pepper Tom, a trail-wise black cowboy who becomes a surrogate father for them. Taking with them Benjie Klomp, a hard-luck Kentucky girl Tom wins in a poker game with some Army men, this apparently mismatched band sets off on the Oregon Trail, headed vaguely for the Sweetwater country of Wyoming. Crossing the Plains, which are referred to as “a crazy country; crazy, crazy people running around,” they are buffeted by both man and nature. Their journey becomes a psychological as well as a physical one as each character either follows a dream or looks for a dream to follow. This small personalized segment of the Westward Movement in the novel functions metaphorically, with each character undergoing a change resulting in a sometimes gradual, sometimes violently immediate shift in awareness of self and the world. That the journey as a rite is a vivid and significant pattern in the design of Western American fiction will come as no surprise 372 Western American Literature to serious readers. What is remarkable is the power and beauty with which the author sets down the physical granularity of the westering experience and blends into it four discrete apprehensions of the West as Dream. Technically, this is a very accomplished novel. For each of the four major characters, John, Mason, Pepper Tom, and Benjie Klomp (there are no minor characters), a discrete sphere of language is created by the use of multiple, alternating, first-person narration through which is woven present, past, and future. A carefully controlled fluidity results from the use of flashbacks and flashforwards as, for example, when we see through Mason Raymond a pivotal action in his life: Mason’s killing Worth Hart to end his suffering after Worth has been mauled by a bear. Even more interesting is the glimpse ahead when Benjie visualizes the fight at the Little Big Horn a month before it occurs or the preview of John Buttes and Tom mining in the Black Hills. Though the author has previously written a formal trilogy, and The Sweetwater can certainly function as the third novel in a Buttes-Raymond trilogy, I hope this novel does not simply mark the end of a trilogy. But even if this fine novel is the last of a threesome, hopefully Ms. Rikhoff will return to the Plains West or beyond, for she is sensitive to the place and...