BOOK REVIEWS Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer. By Alfred Kazin. (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1973. 334 pages. $8.95.) Kazin’s new literary history of post-World War II American fiction does for us that necessary task of analyzing, synthesizing, and classifying the work of a recent period; necessary because the discussion helps to define the contexts of the age and thus provides frames of reference in which to view any individual work. Not only does Kazin chronicle the fictional history of the Atomic Age — an era that was supposed to witness the “death of the novel” but saw instead fiction’s increasing proliferation loom before us as though it were created by some kind of nuclear fission of the imagination — but he also writes in a rich interesting style that makes his criticism a coherent narrative itself. Moving into this enjoyable book, one encounters insights about individual writers and about whole schools of fiction, insights that make sense not only of the literature but of con temporary American experience as well. Yet for all its clear and useful discussion, the book, which Kazin says had “been conceived as an integrated account of the fiction written in the United States since the outset of the World War II,” fails almost completely to mention the novels and stories of an entire American region — the West. To talk about why Kazin ignores Western writers would be only to speculate; still, the names strangely missing from his Bright Book of Life include, to mention a few: John Steinbeck, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, H. L. Davis, A. B. Guthrie, Jr., Wallace Stegner, Paul Horgan, Frank Waters, Vardis Fisher, Jack Kerouac, Wright Morris, Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, N. Scott Momaday, Frederick Manfred, and Richard Brautigan. Leaving out quite a few of those names might be necessary in order to talk intelligently about all of the American fiction of the age; but to pass by all of them without a word is a cold Eastern shoulder indeed (from a man who once taught at UCLA). Perhaps an inquiry more useful than an examina tion of Kazin’s possible motives is a consideration of just how profoundly his regional bias or ignorance affects his conclusions about particular move ments and about the age as a whole. The Bright Book begins with a balanced view of Hemingway’s postwar works, “A Dream of Order.” From showing how Hemingway’s stylistically faithful rendering of the “unmistakable” — “that instinctive unconscious connection with nature” — tried to keep “man and history in order by keep 142 Western American Literature ing them apart” (p. 14), Kazin turns for contrast to Faulkner, whose style serves to recreate in reason the history that man’s heart has forced upon us in blind passion: “thought alone puts the story together — the artist is a chronicler going back into the havoc that has never ended” (p. 28). As the chapter title, “The Secret of the South,” suggests, Faulkner and the other Southern writers seem to Kazin to have wrested from their regional agony a serviceable view of the past. Many of those Western writers Kazin has ignored show us from their regional standpoint a way of dealing with the past that does not restore our old idea of history but that does give a meaningful sense of time and place. Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, for example, contains both Indian time and non-Indian time. As Martha Scott Trimble points out in her recent pamphlet on Momaday, the juxtaposition of Indian and non-Indian time cannot be judged in conventional terms and forces us back upon the land. For it is in the land that Abel, Momaday’s protagonist, attempts to find himself; the rhythms of the land, if submitted to, lead into the house of beauty, the “house made of dawn.” Momaday’s is neither so optimistic nor so pessimistic a treatment of time as the treatments we find in Hemingway, Faulkner, and the Southern writers. After assessing Southern fiction, Kazin examines some American war novelists (Mailer, Jones, Heller, Vonnegut) and the social novelists he calls “Professional Observers” (Cozzens, O’Hara, Cheever, Salinger, and Updike...