Reviews 187 For instance, in the opening story, “Wildflowers I Have Known,” the kid napping from a carwash of a stuffed Alaskan brown bear provides a focus, but no further meaning, to the events of a day that ends with “George, the ardent Arab”sitting in an oak tree, waiting for the narrator to notice the verses he has written to her in chalk on the sidewalk. Such a summary might create the impression that the story has a clearly satiric or even vaudevillian mood. But the comedy glances off these characters, including the narrator, who, though they might often wish to live more seriously, seem to have few opportunities or genuine inclinations to do so. This is “ordinary” life, so patterned with poten tially symbolic objects and potentially meaningful gestures that the comedy in their inevitable oddity, as well as the irony in their predictable self-parody, exhausts itselfand allows a sense ofresolution where none is truly earned: thus, the narrator of the opening story speaks for most of the characters and other narrators of these stories when she concludes, “I slam the door behind me hoping a rain will wash away George’s green chalk. Ifyou lose control ofevents, you can always hope natural forces will intervene on your side.”The marvel is that no one here ever loses control entirely or truly expects such intervention. Osborn is something ofa minimalist, but her stories are less deliberate and cathartic than those of Raymond Carver, Anne Beattie, and Mary Robison. A more apt comparison may be to the more evasive fictions of Frederick Barthelme, or, allowing for some obvious differences in setting and sensibility, to the off-centered stories inJohn O’Hara’s relatively early collection, Hellbox. MARTIN KICH Wright State University—Lake Campus Great California Stories. Edited byA. Grove Day. (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1991. 267 pages, $31.50/$10.95.) Unfortunately, this handsome book is mistitled. It should be called “Good Old White California Stories.” Few of the tales included can be legitimately labeled “great,”and the only contemporary writer included is Wallace Stegner, born in 1909. But that isn’t the worst of it. This state has since World War II produced Maxine Hong Kingston, Gary Soto, AmyTan,Joyce Carol Thomas,J. California Cooper, Toshio Mori, Sherley Anne Williams, Frank Chin, Floyd Salas, Gus Lee, Hisaye Yamamoto, and Wanda Coleman, among many others. All are non-white Californian fictionists, but there are no non-white writers in this anthology, which skews any sense of the state. Remember, by the turn of the next century, California is scheduled to become America’s first mainland state with palefaces a minority. The only material from non-white sources in this collection is the sharp 188 WesternAmerican Literature Miwok tale “Mouse Steals Fire”which opens the book, and Theodora Kroeber’s retelling ofthe Wintu tribe’spowerful “Dance Mad.”After that, readers will find white versions of other races and cultures. This is especially puzzling since editor A. Grove Day—author of The Sky Clears, a landmark study of Native American poetry—writes in the book’s preface, “California is famously polyracial and so is this anthology. Its characters represent a multiplicity of cultures and perspectives. ...” In fact, cultures are represented only from the perspective of the tradition ally dominant group. For instance, “The Somebody” by Danny Santiago was actually written by the late Dan James; it is certainly strong enough to be considered for a California collection, but it isn’t a view of Mexican-American life from within that culture. Sadly, this anthology isn’t what it purports to be: representative of the real California. Too bad, since Day’s brief notes on authors are first-rate and he has included work by several good writers who are usually ignored (Janet Lewis, Idwal Jones, Edwin Corle) along with more predictable ones (Harte, Twain, London, Stegner, et al.). There have, by the way, also been some good white fictionists in the Golden State since World War II, and they too are ignored by the editor: James D. Houston, Ella Leffland, Charles Bukowski, Kate Braverman, Leonard Gardner, along with transplants like Raymond Carver and T. C. Boyle, who have as much...