Reviews 249 Yet there is no mistaking where McPhee stands, either. His recent New Yorker articles on the St. John River in Maine and on the Salmon River in Alaska, the latter a kind of microcosm of the whole Alaskan wilderness question, are two of the most persuasive conservation essays ever written. McPhee works by narrative involvement. We float the river (in The John McPhee Reader, it’s the Colorado, with “archdruid” David Brower and dam-builder Floyd Dominy in a raft together), and we talk with the representatives of various human uses or choices for the river, seeing the water and the rock and the sandbars and the fish and the weather overhead, camping out (awake a lot at night, because McPhee is a light sleeper) ; we learn the personalities of our partners, and are filled in on both the natural and political history of the river in asides by McPhee, and suddenly we realize the whole situation has jelled. We are there, in it. We know the river, as far as language can stretch anyway, and to know it is to respect it. THOMAS J. LYON, Utah State University Shifting World: Social Change and Nostalgia in the American Novel. By David C. Stineback. (Lewisburg:Bucknell University Press, 1976. 192 pages, $11.50.) De Tocqueville, that acute observer of our democratic pageant, pointed out the paradox of America’s animated monotony and changing sameness. Still, in Shifting World David S. Stineback focuses attention on ten “distinctive” American novels which dramatize the tension between social change and personal nostalgia. In his chosen ten, each one certainly more than a mere “imitation” of historical social life, Stineback intelligently traces the steps whereby the leading characters come to feel a sense of “loss and disappointment.” The mercurial surface of American social history causes the maturing character in each novel to fear disorder, long for past values, yearn for rest. Of Stineback’s chapters on these novels “about” history — The Pioneers, The House of the Seven Gables, Democ racy, The Bostonians, The House of Mirth, The Professor’s House, The Sheltered Life, The Fathers, The Hamlet, These Thousand Hills — the chapters on James Fenimore Cooper, Willa Cather, and A. B. Guthrie, Jr. would interest readers of this journal particularly. The Pioneers, Stineback correctly notes, is distinctively less casuistical than Cooper’s other novels. This novel renders a vivid sense of nature changing rapidly by the hand of man. While the fruit of Marmaduke Temple’s industry is social alteration, Natty Bumppo tries to sustain the permanence of the natural world. Stineback observes that in The Pioneers 250 Western American Literature Cooper divides his sympathy three ways: Judge Temple, Chingachgook, and Natty — all “gentlemen” — represent kinds of order. As to the final good or ill of human history, Cooper remains noncommittal, for his hero can flee social change, can move at will away from the clearings. In Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House (indeed, underrated) young Tom Outland’s vital tale of his adventures on the Blue Mesa in New Mexico is subaltern to middle-aged Professor Godfrey St. Peter’s despair on the shores of Lake Michigan. Stineback demonstrates that Outland’s bright character is the type of St. Peter’s own youthful and adventurous self. “The more St. Peter’s mundane society seems to conspire against his cherished ideals, the more he retires to the narrow privacy of his old house, and the more he dwells nostalgically on those indefinable qualities that made the past for him better than the present.” St. Peter envisions Indian life in the Cliff City as transcending the disorder and insecurity of his world. While his family is in Paris, lonely St. Peter, lost in his memories of Outland and the Blue Mesa, nearly sacrifices his life to the past. Stineback’s inclusion of a Western writer like Guthrie in a study like this is not only refreshing but justified. As with The Big Sky, The Way West, and Arfive, the lesser-known These Thousand Hills also creates patterns out of social change and nostalgia. Lat Evans, who becomes a big rancher and town leader, feels the painful ambivalence of his historical situation and of his...