The Wedding by Mary Helen Ponce

Abstract

262 Western American Literature successful when it tries too hard to establish the connections between the human mind and the hammock forest. Some of Wallace’s more abstract ramblings, though never uninteresting, can seem a bit tangential. Since the book is so firmly rooted in its place, any intellectual wanderings that take us too far from the sensuous reality of the hammock are immediately apparent. I strongly recommend Bulow Hammock to the readers of Western Ameri­ can Literature. As a book about Florida by a “western” writer raised in New England, it crosses many boundaries and shows how, asJohn Muir once wrote, “everything ishitched to everything else.” SEAN O’GRADY University of California, Davis The Wedding. By Mary Helen Ponce. (Houston: Arte Publico, 1989. 199 pages, $8.50.) The theme of Ponce’s novel, as the title suggests, is a wedding between Blanca Munoz and Sammy-the-Gricket Lopez. The story takes place in a barrio of Los Angeles, sarcastically named Los Tacones by its laboring-class inhabitants. Each chapter, a humorous, sometimes slapstick unfolding of events leading up to the wedding day, is a vignette of Mexican-American traditions. With the familiar props of the fifties: hairstyles, clothes, music, and cars, the wedding excitement is contrasted with the harsher reality of growing up in the barrio. The author creates vivid images of the people in the story living in one-room shacks, with outdoor plumbing, and enduring dusty bus rides into Los Angeles. Coping with poverty is not the only circumstance suffered by the women in Los Tacones. We see Blanca lower her expectations ofCricket each time she is confronted by his unyielding feelings of superiority. However, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that this male dominance only happened in His­ panic culture. A double standard for the sexes was part of most American life in the fifties. The faulty belief that romantic love could overcome all obstacles was not so much a tragedy just of young Hispanic women but of many women across America. We should use caution reading this novel and realize that human weakness is not specific to any one group. Familiarity with the Spanish language is not necessary for a good reading of this book. The meanings of the few Spanish words and phrases used can be contextually understood. Otherwise, Ponce’s characters speak their own lan­ guage as this exchange between Cricket and Blanca demonstrates. And whatcha gonna do tonight? Nuttin. Ya wanna go to the chow? Reviews 263 The fifties setting, so popular today with many writers and movie makers, provides another commentary on that time—a look into how a subjected cul­ ture lives through one of the most prosperous eras of Anglo-American history. Perhaps Ponce is making the point that humor, however dark, is necessary for survival, and, although they may be uneducated and unsophisticated, all of her characters are survivors. RITA BURLESON MELENDEZ El Paso Community College The End of Nature. By Bill McKibben. (New York: Random House, 1989. 226 pages, $19.95.) This somberly titled book, whose black jacket features an artist’s concep­ tion of an overheated earth, isbeing widely talked about as the ’90s’equivalent of Silent Spring. There is, I think, substantial validity in the linkage. The thesis is that industrial man, mainly by adding enormous amounts of carbon dioxide and methane to the air, has “substantially altered the earth’s atmosphere” (italics in original). The alteration, which continues and may be accelerating, will have major effects on worldwide climatic regimes. By our own folly, greed, unconsciousness, and so forth, we have banished ourselves, perhaps forever, from a world where at least the broad outlines of the weather, and the produc­ tivity of the ecosystems dependent on it, were generally predictable, year to year. We are, McKibben argues, in for tough times. The corollary to this thesis is where the book’stitle comes in. Bybecoming the manager of the atmosphere, affecting now the whole earth through such phenomena as acid rain, humanity has effectively canceled its own conception of nature as wild. The rain that falls isnow to some significant degree our rain. Not only isthe world no longer reliable in the old way...