Reviews 77 fight with hay forks and manure forks, and farmers, over the course of the next half hour, become soldiers. It is through good fortune alone that they are never called upon to perform. The stories are a vivid encounter with a proud and determined people. Face to face with the Dutch settlers and their struggles, one remembers other immigrants on similar soil: Norwegians in Giants in the Earth, Danes in Julie McDonald’s Petra, and Frederick Manfred’s Frisian-Saxon forebears and family in Green Earth. Schaap is telling the familiar story of Great Plains newcomers who, through sometimes little more than sheer will power, carved a kingdom, or at least a promise of one. TERRY ANDREWS LASANSKY St. Paul, Minnesota Appaloosa Rising: The Legend of the Cowboy Buddha. By Gino Sky. (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1980. 284 pages, $10.95 hardcover, $5.95 paperback.) Don Coyote, one of the characters in Appaloosa Rising, says of one of the novel’s episodes that it is a “supernatural morality play.” The same can be said of the whole novel, provided you add that it moves between tall tale and homemade myth, bolstered by LSD-inspired visions that have been recounted after copious drafts of Dickel’s Sour Mash Whiskey. The plot of such a fiction is not summarized briefly or serenely, so buckle your seatbelt. The novel begins in Stanley, Idaho, where Jonquil Rose is irate because his wife, Infinity Cactus, has run away with a hippie to go mountainclimbing in Nepal. In order to vent his wrath, Jonquil shoots and kills Jimmy Maroon, his 1955 pickup. The next several episodes at first appear to have nothing to do with the pickupicide, but the later gathering of all the characters at Jonquil’s ranch suggests that their destinies are intertwined. The second episode — published previously in Penthouse — tells the story of Billy Sunday, an eastern Idaho lad who plays a magic trombone in the Church of the Last Chance Cowboys. The bubbles emerging from his trombone contain incredible sights, including the face of Jesus and the Cowboy Buddha riding a Brahma bull out of the third eye of God. Even more incredible than those trombubblevisions is the account in the next episode of a cheerleader’s immaculate conception, followed some years later by her first sexual intercourse, which occurs during the Yellowstone earth quake of ’59. Her earthquakey lover is Jonquil Rose’s younger brother Ranger, whose mother Syringa mystically senses his return home. But her parapsychological feat is nothing compared to Billy Sunday’s next trombone trick: he turns 56-year-old Cody St. Kid into a seventeen-year-old rodeo queen — and wins an imaginary rodeo. Among Sky’s fellow Idahoans, reactions to Appaloosa Rising have ranged from delight to disgust. Such divergent responses sometimes herald 78 Western American Literature the arrival of a classic. Unfortunately, that’s not the case with Appaloosa Rising. Those who like Sky’s novel enjoy his wild, humorous use of language (often akin to frontier boasting) ; the pointed satire directed at many things Idahoan; the attempt to create a new, liveable mythology out of scraps of Native American, Tibetan, hippie, ecologist, and cowboy philosophy; and the dazzling imaginative flights in some passages. Those who dislike the book for other than Moral Majority reasons usually point out its evident weaknesses: considerable incoherence and lack of structure; the boring repetition of what were lively fresh expressions the first twenty times around; the preachiness and self-contradiction in the factitious myth; and too many signs of sprawl — a good tall tale that came down with cancer. Although I enjoyed parts of the novel, its many flaws make it the sort of Idahoiana that I won’t long to re-read. Because of his style, technique, and ideas, Sky will inevitably be com pared with Richard Brautigan, Tom Robbins, Thomas Pynchon, and Thomas McGuane, but I’m afraid he’ll suffer by comparison. What he needs in order to rescue the interesting possibilities of his talent from overkill is a good editor, a latter-day Max Perkins. Put such an editor together with Sky’s imaginative power, and the furor following the publication of...