BOOK REVIEWS Rockspring. By R. G. Vliet. (New York: The Viking Press, 1974, 120 pp. $6.95.) Rockspring is a novel that depends more upon poetry than plot. Not that the plot is not sufficiently gripping. The setting is southwest Texas in the early 1830’s when the land still belonged to Mexico. Jensie, a fourteen-year-old pioneer girl with pure white hair, soft and shiny, the color of “a junco’s breast feathers,” is swimming in the Nueces River, when three Mexican bandidos come upon her and carry her off. The oldest outlaws, fat Toral the leader, and the Aztec Nahuatl, repeatedly rape her; the youngest, Bernardino, not much older than Jensie, refrains. In the first days of her captivity, Jensie wishes to die; she refuses to eat or drink until she has a fit. But gradually the life instinct asserts itself. She learns the ways of survival during the ordeal of the flight and a winter in a canyon that serves as “her stone prison.” The winter is a kind of death, but spring brings rebirth. Toral is killed by Indians, and young Bernardino promises to take Jensie back to her family. When the Nahuatl tries to kill him, Bernardino has to shoot the Indian in self defense. During the journey back, the two hitherto inarticulate and incommunicative teenagers fall in love. By the time she returns home, Jensie (not yet aware that the morning sickness she experiences is the result of pregnancy from one of her violators) has undergone a transformation from child to woman, from Anglo to one who thinks first in Spanish. The denouement has a tragic inevitability. Though the narrative is compelling, it is not especially original; it is as old as the numerous accounts of Puritan maidens kidnapped by Indians and as current as the case of Patricia Hearst. What gives Rockspring its individuality is the language. It is R. G. Vliet’s first novel. Hitherto, he has been a poet who twice won the Texas Institute of Letters Award. Though he now lives in Vermont, Vliet grew up in Texas and knows the territory. His novella shows a fine feeling for landscape, often rendered in poetic stream-of-consciousness. Evoking a primitive, unspoiled country of savage beauty, he includes prose poems on the sun and the empty spaces — 220 Western American Literature “Ese sol tan alto, esta eterna tierra.” “West, a low shelf of burning light, clouds, the last like an orange-hot anvil; east, the first stars showing, and night rising like water to douse the anvil.” The locale is a land of scorpions and rattlesnakes, “country of the thousand thorns . . . Agarita, catclaw, mesquite, Spanish bayonet, tasajillo, prickly pear.” The narrative is both lyric and brutal, a conflict of spirit and flesh. The treatment of rape avoids all pornographic detail: “Jensie had begged the two men, cried for them to cut her throat for her, and let her grief free. They only cut her with softer knives.” But style is sometimes a problem. Writing in the third person but through Jensie’s point of view, Vliet blends lyric eloquence and pioneer illiteracy in a not altogether successful combination. For instance, “Her hair flew in threads of bright. That was when she seen the three Mexicans. She didn’t waste no time. . . . A flush of stonesuck jugged her chest. Sudden somewhere a high wind creaked. Then her whole flesh snapped.” Though rich in imagery and striking metaphors, the style is sometimes too obstrusive and self-conscious. At first the Mexicans’ dialogue is all in Spanish. Then as Jensie absorbs their language, the dialogue gradually shifts more and more to English, though until the homeward trek, when Jensie and Bernardino open them selves to each other, there is very little dialogue. Her thinking in Spanish “changed the look of everything,” and her first reaction, “O never never see her people more! Never hear a sound of English! Lost! Gone barren as those canyon places she was headed for. The colorless country,” changes to an awareness of having found a new Jensie. First printed in The Hudson Review, Rockspring is not a Western for Zane Grey fans, but the discriminating reader will find...