Reviews 235 Kirkland obtained access to the unpublished material from the Texas Historical Association, and from an eighty-page booklet written by Robert Potter, located in the library of the University of North Carolina. The latter document details Potter’s past as a North Carolina Congressman, and of his defense of his crimes, written while he was in prison. Divorce, prison and ostracism had driven him to Texas where he met Harriet Moore Page, who with her two children had been abandoned in 1835 by her husband, Solomon Page, an inveterate and unskilled gambler who had gone to join Sam Hous ton’s newly formed army. Potter, then Secretary of the Navy of the Republic, persuaded her that under Texas law her marriage to Page was annulled, and legalized their relationship. They set up housekeeping in a wilderness paradise on Caddo Lake near Jefferson, Texas, still known as Potter’s Point. He was killed in 1842, but not before she learned of his crimes. Her last husband was Charles Ames, and she bore her various husbands eighteen children. The Edge of Disrepute is set in 1846 in New Orleans. The heroine, a young woman named Sarah Belle Locke, lives alone “in a modest house . . . located on the fringe of respectability and the edge of disrepute.” The author explains in a foreword that the story takes place in New Orleans because Sarah Belle’s friends, a voodoo queen, a merchant prince, a humanitarian genius of disguise among the gens de couleur libres, and an antiquarian adventurer, make such a setting necessary in order to capture the essence of romanticism. Whereas Love is a Wild Assault deals with fact and authenticity, and provides vivid and exciting accounts of living conditions, politics and chicanery in early-day Texas, The Edge of Disrepute demands from the outset the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” In the end the reader is left with a sense that Sarah Belle will find whatever it is that she has always been seeking—some thing vague but wonderful. Of the three novels, Love is a Wild Assault is the strongest. It is the kind of story that rings with truth, and it deals with a heroine (all three novels center on women) who is beautiful, courageous, likeable and enduring. All three works take considerable reading time, so, if one is limited for time, Love is a Wild Assault will pay the most dividend. DORYS CROW GROVER East Texas State University Always Coming Home. By Ursula K. LeGuin. (New York: Harper & Row, 1985. 523 pages, $17.95 hardcover.) A core assumption of California visionary writing is that its landscape can become— under conditions which the writer provides—the perfect home which generations of westward-moving immigrants have sought. Thus Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, for example, ends with these words by the Eastern hero, describing his journey and initiation: “It brought me home.” 236 Western American Literature Always Coming Home is set thousands of years hence, in a post-industrial California. Our age has vanished, leaving only submerged ruins, pockets of radiation and chemical pollution, some genetic damage, but scarcely a mem ory. The valleys are populated by gentle tribes who are, as the book’s last lines remind us, our children, the people we were always trying to become. It is not an entirely unfallen Eden. The Condor people, nomads from (of course) the East, come to threaten with airplanes, tanks, and monotheism, nightmare echoes of our own time. Readers expecting a linear account of the conflict between Kesh and Condor will be frustrated, however. LeGuin has created an anti-novel, mas querading as an anthropologist’s study, containing songs (there is even an accompanying cassette), legends, descriptions of the material culture of the Kesh, observations of their ceremonies, charts and tables, and narratives by some of the villagers. The reader is gradually introduced into this world, learns its geography, reads its map, and uncovers its covert science-fiction elements. Sometimes LeGuin steps into her own tale, under the guise of “Pandora,” and discusses with the reader this strange and wonderful work, this “Up Yours to the people who ride snowmobiles, make nuclear weapons, and run prison camps by a middle...