176 Western American Literature in The Reasonableness of Christianity. Then, too, if the letter that the author “came back to” in the last chapter had been mentioned in the introduction, the book would have been tied together a little more securely, and the last paragraph would seem less of a sentimental afterthought. But after all, some of the best son-of-a-gun stews are thrown together hastily, and a good appetite welcomes the result. GEORGE EWING, Abilene Christian College The Last Valley. By A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Com pany, 1975. 293 pages, $8.95.) A. B. Guthrie, Jr.’s latest work demonstrates one of the important functions of the novel — to present a picture of a time and a place and a people drawn not through the use of objective data or theoretical constructs but from a human perspective, through character and scene and tone and the selective vision of the artist. Contemporary psychologists and sociolo gists, along with some critics will be asking, “Were there ever people like that?” Brought up under the effects of the Skinnerian revoluton and the emphasis on only the contemporary — the now — they will be highly skep tical that such people existed, and will believe that Guthrie is romanticizing, if not actually sentimentalizing, the past. In describing the age that produced the type of characters found in The Last Valley, Robert H. Wiebe in The Search for Order uses such terms as “community government,” “paternal,” “personal,” and “informal.” That age, which Guthrie carries up through World War II, was, Wiebe main tains, a time of adjustment between the needs of small communities and the more “hierarchical” type of government needed for urban-industral life — one assumes, then, the contemporary bureaucracies. To answer the ques tion posed above; of course there were people like the ones Guthrie describes, people who assumed responsibility for the cohesion necessary to the life of their community and who assumed that responsibility out of a sense of duty. It is to be remembered that these people were inner-directed, working from some combination of experience and principle (at best) and selfinterest (at worst) and community interest. Frequently, at least in this novel, it is principle that carries the day — sometimes for the good, but not always. These are not other-directed personalities whose relativism forces them to wait to see what others are doing and what is being accepted before they can act, in some wild belief that such a method rules out self-interest. Guthrie’s portraits may seem strange to us in this day, since they have been attacked for their WASPishness, their self-interested individualism, and even their individualistic (rather than governmentally bureaucratized) paternal ism. They have become scapegoats. Reviews 177 Though Guthrie may give short shrift to his less savory characters, he develops the major characters with enough complexity that they are believable as human beings. They have their failings as well as their virtues. Guthrie’s perspective allows him not only to understand them but to treat sympathetically their struggles to preserve their individual integrity against the forces of ambition, sex, corporate power, nature, and the mental and physical erosion of day-to-day existence. He is charitable always toward their human, thus limited, capabilities. The novel is more effectively structured than Arfive. The book jacket reports its three-part division, suggesting also three climactic scenes, “an open fight with the super-patriots, a terrifying encounter with a grizzly bear, and an unprecedented flood that drives the townspeople to a hill.” Actually, there are more climactic scenes than that, but even more important are the anti-climaxes: the discovery, by an old newspaperman, of courage and pride, even though he is too tired and defeated to feel the victory; the discovery of a younger newspaperman, that every course of action is “haunted by uncertainty,” and then his equally illuminating discovery of his wife’s faith and idealism; and finally his arrival at the knowledge that quality, not quantity, is important, despite the American insistence on “progress” for its own sake. The book jacket also reports that Guthrie has suggested that this will be his last novel about America’s westering. Surely...