| Show t ' "7 - ' 44VAV4i'V'O'0L-4--w4sT4- ' ' tLV 7 --- - ' 4' AP'kwie'i-v''4motv T 2E The Salt Lake Tribune Sunday January 21 g - 4- - v-r- -ic -- v-4' - 4'‘''6' ' door-to-doo- o71 Alexander's book is the tale of her recent travels in Gabon on the western coast of Africa a trip she undertook in an attempt to retrace the journey made more than 90 years earlier by Mary Kingsley a Victorian spinster who investigated this area and its natives in 1895 Kingsley was a woman filled with pluck and curiosity and her classic book about the trip Travels in West Africa is noteworthy for its humor vigor and readability Those attributes also character- ize this new book by Alexander a Rhodes scholar who has competed in the pentathlon and been a university lecturer in the classics Al 4 - '4 7:iiv 7-- r fl 176AKZ47Z:7104r A14 ' '' 40vs4s444e--4Ii--00-0W111144N-- !:::1b WWIPVAWA44'-i-P4A4WV-viqrA- : r'1:'a0tCsfefr:grAA ! 411113lf-tt4r- V J''N'°W4'1P'4r'10"No'0N'-ikfci-- ii Mysterious hero returns with Vineland Vineland by Thomas Pynchon Little Brown 385 pp 91995 Thomas Pynchon's novels and his hermetic life have made him a nVaterious hero The author of V Thf Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rain bow grew up on Long Island went to Cornell (where he took Vladimir Na bokov's literature course) worked for Boeing as a technical writer field V and dropped out of sight There is a Pynchon newsletter a Pynchon journal that comes ant twice a year and an annotated version of Gravity's Rainbow There is plenty of grist for the Prichon journal in Vineland his first navel since Gravity's Rainbow 17 years ago Pynchon scholars have no doubt already speculated that the title is a reference to the Vinland covered by Norse navigators the people who really found the New World SO much is stuffed into any Pynchon work you could probably find a reference to your Auut Millie (or Uncle Virmie) in this one if you looked hard enough The world is divided into partisans who adore Pynchon liooks because they're full of thoughts rich in theories dense with invention loaded with history — and detractors who bog down after 25 pages Compared to the Bayeux Tapestry of any one of the previous Pynchon novels Vine land is macrame Which may make it easier for some of the previously and unsatisfying for bogged-dowsmne of the previously adoring Vineland is set in California — in an area that hasn't exactly been overworked by fiction writers the coastal redwood country between Eureka and Crescent City The made-uCalifornia town Qf the title is "A Harbor of Refuge" according to an 1851 survey Map a place "to attend to territories of the spirit" For 14 years our hero Zoyd Wheeler a slightly successful rock musician of the '60s has been raising his daughter Prairie and attending to his spirit there As the book opens in 1984 his refuge is destroyed when Brock Vond a federal drug proseeu tor who is also the lover of Wheeler's e Frinesi comes hunting him You don't have to be a Pynchon scholar to catch the significance of the year The name "Frenest" comes from an Artie Shaw record of the late 140s Pynchon uncharaeteristi cally explains ICsuggests Zoyd manages by unclogging gutters fixing roofs catching crawfish and jumping through a plate-glas- s window once a year to qualify for his mental-disabilitcheck This is a man who lacking sugar puts Nes exander's trip was in many ways less dangerous less mysterious less adventurous than that of Kingsley Yet her book resonates with a similar spirit because it isn't just a story of her journey It is a travelogue through history as well as geography One Dry Season is as much the story of a handful of vibrant courageous and eccentric souls — Kingsley Albert Schweitzer Dr Robert Nassau and his two wives Trader Horn — as it is a narrative of what Alexander saw when and where Indeed it is the history of the places the visits the research she has done on the people who once labored there and often died there that gives her experiences a particular piquancy Thus when Alexander writes "To discover Trader Horn is to have a new planet swim into one's ken" she isn't going off on a tangent but rather getting to the heart of her story In a book he wrote with the help of Lewis Trader Horn told of a series of adventures worthy of Indiana Jones and while many of his stories are obvi6usly exaggerated Alexander notes that there is strong evidence that they were founded to some extent at least in fact But the riches of Horn's book Alexander says are in its "distinctive and haunting mood of humour wonderment and melancholy told in inimitably archaic Trader Horn recalls language what few of the other writers-whdescribed this part of the world give any evidence of ever having realized a sense of the freshness of life in as yet unplundered Africa the wonderment of its beauty and acute consciousness of the uniqueness of his experience" It is no small compliment to say that Alexander has that same freshness and wonderment and sensitivity — Patrick Reardon Chicago Tribune n p ex-wif- Writers offer readings Thursday at Fiction writer Jan Nystrom and poet Mike White of the University of Utah Creattve Writing Program will read from their works Thursday ' P ' 1990 Retracing footsteps of Mary Kingsley One Dry Season: In the Footsteps of Mary Kingsley by Caroline Alexander Knopf 287 pp $1895 "Ma'am" the peddler said" "I could tell you — I've seen Ile was an old man at the edge of senitity an Englishman from Lancashire selling wire kitchen r in Johannesgoods burg South Africa The year was 1928 and he called himself Trader 'Horn "Africa Ma'am Africa — as 'attire meant her to be the home of the black man and the quiet elephant Never a sound Ma'am in the great landscape at noon — Bound by the rites of Egbo ma'am to be blood brother of cannibals — Why I was only a lad when I took that other poor lady's body down the river to try and get safe burial for it at Kangwe Well of course they'd never seen a white woman before up at Samba " Falls Trader Horn also called Aloysills Horn born Aloysius Smith had been in Africa for more than half a century when he sputtered out those disjointed recollections during his first meeting with British voilter Ethelreda Lewis And it is with obvious relish that Caroline Alexander recounts that meeting in her book One Dry Seas- I V pm in Waking Owl Books 208 13th East The reading by the U of U Creative Writing Program is free to the public 7 S y lip take i1t taunt tle's Quik on top of his Froot Loops Unfortunately the story drops the likable man who opens the book and slides sideways into the story of his daughter's search for her mother and then into stories within that sto ry about her mother and her moth er's friend Darryl Louise Chastain Army brat and Ninja warrior Character is not what the book is about There's not a single character you or Pynchon wouldn't drop without a seecnd thought except for Zoyd's daughter (of 07110P1 whoa writes "she felt sorsa unamustomed bloom of tenderness for this scroungy usually d fringe element she'd been ossigued on this planet for a minutes mockery of the family's marble sink with gold mermaids for tap handles brings to mind why Mario Cucmo will have a hard time running for president There is much playfulness here that doesn't need a point to be enjoyable The horn player in a punk band is 187 he named himself after the California Penal Code section for murder Zoyd has a job for a while on Kahuna Airlines to Hawaii on which "the list of passengers who arrived was not always identical to the list of those who'd departed" (Pursuing the pleasures of being a Pynchon scholar I add that Kahuna Nui is a high priest Huna is a secret or magical thing Kahuna is one who is the master of the secret and perhaps more to the point the Big Kahuna is what Frankle Avalon was often called in beach-blankmovies) If some of the humor is labored (there's a punk band called Billy Barf and the Vomitones) much of it makes you glad Pynchon's around to make even bad jokes A check batted around between waitress and customer flutters down onto the condiment tray Says Zoyd "Check's in the mayo" One of Zoyd's jobs is helping the lawn service run by the Marquis de Sod — "E'll wheep your lawn into shepp!" Science is not used as a metaphor here as it has been in previous Pynchons There are plenty of computers but the computer isn't a metaphor It's a source of irritation rather than fascination When Fren- esi can't get her federal check cashed she has some poignant thoughts: "We are digits in God's computer she not so much thought Ls bummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune and the only thing we're good for to be dead or to be living is the only thing He sees What we cry what we contend for in our world of toil and blood it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God" Pynchon fanatics tend to be GE Science Fair winners academics with a lot of time on their hands and radicals The early novels have a strange enthusiasm for catastrophe Things will run down and fall apart and that's fine because we all deserve it Vineland may disappoint those interesting paranoids — it's short on doom and light on impending catastrophe But then book itself is a sort of a likable catastrophe — Constance Casey Knight-Ridde- r Newspapers Book Review "Gilligan's Island" The bad are not very dark and the good are not well defined The book is generally in favor of the sweet and shaggy mongrel dogs and shedding redwood trees and the folks who formed "a people's miracle an army of loving friends" People from "the Mellow Sixties a slower-movintime predigital not yet so cut into pieces not even by television" None of the sweet and mellow confronts Vond The nearest thing to a fight comes when Prairie tells him "But you can't be my father Mr Vond My blood is Type A Yours is Preparation H " and he melts like the witch in the Wizard of Oz soon g slow-witte- after father") It seems to me P3rnshon misreads the '80s a bit To many people par ticularly those who didn't live in communes without electricity the decade was almost defined as being cut up by television Back then an image from Vietnam or Paris or Memphis or Los Angeles or Newark could really cut up your day The his todcal sweep of Pynchon's previous books (Gravity's Rainbow included a history of German colonies in Africa) is sadly absent in Vineland The most we get is a sentence about log gers in lumber country a couple of graphs about union organizers in Pyrichoies previous books were moved by a plot in the sense of malign scheme as well as in the sense of story In each a bizarre situation was set up and the reader and maiicharacters had to work out the puzzle Which is better the books asked: that life is meaningless or life is a plot and you're the victim? Put in Vineland it's a very small something globally spealdog that sos the plot rolling — Frenest's weakness for men with badges This sexual preference could be a metaph or for the eternal attraction of force and order In any case her love of the cleanshaven and short-hairepersonified in the villainous Vond leads her to betray her '60s friends in the Movement and abandon her infant daughter "Some Cosmic Faseist" Pyncluns writes "bad spliced in a DNA sequefice requiring this form of seduction and initiation in to the dark Joys of social control" Her Mother's weakness eventually makes Prairie a hostage to fortune and the Drug Enforcement Agency Not much more than moderate anxiety is provoked here Prairie is protected by her mother's friend Zoyd is chased menacingly but mostly offstage by Vond Onstage his pursuer isa lesser drug officer flee tor Zuniga whose relationship to Oyd is compared to that of Sylvester to Tweety Hector himself is being pursued by the National Endowment for Video Education'and Rehabilita tion trying to cure his addiction to Hollywood What Pynchon does get quite brilliantly is the hula of background noise in 1984 — the road signs the music the TV shows the video games that are always shaping our thinking The way Jason of "Friday the 13th" is never far from the mind of anyone under 28 And Pyriction can be very funny and sharply satirical Zeyd comes block of mariborne to find a juana sitting in his house After the drug agents come and the setup is complete the block is "ready to be hauled back to whatever spacious Museum of Drug Abuse it had been borrowed from" His satire is desul tory though He never follows up this sharp observation: "In those days it was still unthinkable that any North American agency would kill its OWII civilians and then lie about d g Prairie ends up in an Italian wed Something's missing from narrative of Gore Vidal's Hollywood Bo yuood by Gore Vidal Random HOuse 437 pp $1995 Hollywood despite its title is really a sequel to - 71111rrl'ff Gore Vidal's pre- - :: i414: vious navel Em- - pin' and the lat- - ?01 ' est installment in 4 the author's tic- tional portrait of jet:' American histo- ry which now in- - '' eludes in chrono- - 9 0 ' It 'ic--:)- order logical A (though not the order' in which Gore Vidal they have been written and published) Burr Lincoln 1876 Empire Hollywood and Washington DC Readers who found Empire one of the best in the series as this reviewer did may enjoy that novel's afterglow in Hollywood which takes the United States from its entry into World War I under the leadership of President Woodrow Wilson through the death in 1924 of his successor Warren Gamaliel Harding and the accession to the presidency of Calvin Coolidge On the final page of Hollywood a woman seated next to Coolidge at a dinner party says to him "I've just made a bet that I can get you to say more than three words to me" writts "The president As Vidal had then turned his head toward her and in his highly imitable Yankee voice said 'You wizened-appl- e lose:7$ Fortunately most of the details of Hollywood are far less shopworn In three of the main fictional characters of Empire reappear: Caroline Sanford Sanford and Blais'e DelaCroix Sanford the half:Siblings who are of the influential Washington Tribune as well as Caroline's sometime lover James Burden Day now elevated to' the Senate A new fictional character a former dry goods dealer from Marion Ohio named Jesse Smith is a confidant of Harding's wife known as the duchess and a crony of Harding's future attorney general the venal Harry M Daugherty Among them these four characters offer a bird's-ey- e view of the period's great events Mainly through the eyes of Sen Burden Day who serves as Woodrow Wilson's informal adviser on the mood of the Senate we witness Wilson's agonizing decision to lead America into the European war as well as Sen Henry Cabot Lodge's successful campaign to keep the United States out of the League of Nations Through Jesse Smith's eyes we watch the poll ticking that gave Harding the presidency in 1920 as well as the selling of favors that made Harding's administration one of the most corrupt In American history it Week 4 The t 9 prei kiwis 10 The know" litut I 19 2 t Meanwhile Caroline Sanford 3 Week 006 Knit King Dodd" Peeie L Cieur PO Preterit Never Ciorce Colibboot kitchens( IL Prookuirs illodUitgfk leo lakes Nom aktmettlioNto Melt 1 the Not Watt Mibut9 s Anwty SWIM onti klis Mott Utwori l through her friendship with William Randolph Hearst goes to Hollywood becomes a silent screen star using the stage name Emma Traxler and gets involved with the director William Desmond Taylor who ends up the victim of murder in a case that has continued to intrigue Hollywood up to the present day 1 Weeks Ori List 10 6 I 6 6 12 10 42 S 24 I 0 S noes On ON When On II Fulghtin N I 7 6 14014144104414140044e llose 4nouton4104446 I Tho hugtolWinne& L 4 1144 $444114 to 0444 C74d 04641 WOOS 01444A Matt food Mee Omits Mot Ostatbook IL 0444 to - InTi 1 c 4441 1 ' 1 4 V Styrofoam Heads V Wicker Straw & Excelsior Heart Wreaths ALL VALENTINE NOVELTIES I V Wood Heads V Anything Heart 9GtraogoNO OFF Valentina Ribbon 2 oz 1?'° ACRYLIC PAINTS ALL Today I2 8( TOO 26 k 11 i 3 4 t 4 '” ' - if L1747 ) ' 1 orlig7: : N 741t - AItii Al a 1114 - - i Z t V c) 9A11mirit Mom nor IMP' Illivtalt 4p 0 wits1AL h:' ' 4:LI'epli1-- " '- I- - - 1:76 mins - - - - ! g Hear tile Utah Symphony play at warp speed as academy film composer Jeny Goldsmith conducts the music of space movies Alien and : StarTrek 1 ia 1!" 4 a 4 "Lkitg4 etretliT!'411:erma:: 4 : Inrgine a AP'''1sAl'44d4br o orcr-award-winnin- the hall with GrendinS and Hoosiers yOUTZ:hg:isflaSt The drama of Ranh euphoria of Patton It's an entire evening of the hest movies you've ever heard under the baton of a Hollywood giant Join composer conductor Jerry Goldsmith for "Let's Go to the Movies" lanualy 26 and 27 at Symphony Hall Tickets $ S to $15 Students $5 For more information call the Box office at 4114' :int oT-tL- A via E CikSL UTAIICY1111'110NY KILICA1 gaol 314 luceph Silvert'tin Music Director 1' eTI 1!4! - 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SALE 1 NS trucDaritra3 4 l WookS vows" 1 York Times 4 i 1C110100k1 t topher LehmannHaupt The New 04111 - - But this is an all too unusually viv Id moment in Hollywood And the insight that it presumably reflects is too trivial to offset the impression a reader gets that in this novel Vidal is doing his own particular vaudeville dance And even at that he is only going through the motions — Chris ' wimMImemol - fates' 9 Lott Week ma44141 114t Om night Mary by no means the worst of 9 9 3 t 4 114o II It h 10 qty:1 Fisher 17111 Weeks Utt 3 43 10 S Week 011 tof tom Ilkoesiws I ê last WM and Ncmni Ilan II a 4 3 Unti Paker took DMA Birel ON Ryon 9 Clininiels el AnweVIA Donk4 Id 10 C4111 Wow 4344419 OM At 40 Grant4 On" liMes1417a0A 1114401440444 liewillellm Thit Week kn! 004 - :: 7 44 41 1'4444our An MI " 'Do that and they'll put me away' Wilson laughed 'Or send me out on the Keith circuit with Mid ' I 10149entAllwk 4 lay ?um Won 0 M4m11411 0 9 tion' ' ' 14 kr4114 4 7 acts RI r'uVageohonmuni 3 Plehoo TO Wad Mee 14404441 United State& This 649 West 5300 0 L Nor Veit New WOO tidings deiow ors bood on OodideNNOTeeekted $ales kguts4 rtoin zaoo bectsiOies in goo? feigion ol the The ' 1 p AR I ished he bowed "Blaise applauded loudly 'Do that when you address the Congress Mr President and you'll sweep the na- sends Caroline Sanford to Hollywood and has her recognize the historical significance of film making Even Woodrow Wilson himself reveàls for a moment a perception of where American leadership is headed "You know I could've done well In vaudeville" he tells Blaise Sanford dsring a shipboard interview on the way home from the Paris peace conference "Suddenly" writes Vidal "he let his face go loose The face totally slack was cretinous and comical The body drooped complementing the face 'I'm Dopey Dan' he sang 'and I'm married to Midnight Mary' With that he did an expert scarecrow sort of dance across the deck whistling all the while When be fin Best Sellers smoke-filled-roo- r Crafts Etc South torical in a middle ground that fills the novel's entire canvas Another difficulty is Vidal's mixed-ufeelings about the era He seems to admire Woodrow Wilson for recognizing what entry into the war would do to America 'We shall have become what we are fighting" Wilson tells Day "We shall be trying to reconstruct a Rene-tim- e civilization with war time standards That's not possible and ace everyone will be involved there'll be no bystanders with sufficient power to make a Just peace" In contrast Vidal regards the corrupt regime of Harding with amused affection He seems to resolve these dissonant attitudes simply by declaring America's He al He al He As always Vidal succeedsin making his history alive and plausible Without interrupting his narrative flow he gives us cleverly detailed sketches of such people as Franklin D and Eleanor Roosevelt Alice Roo sevelt Longwortli Douglas Fairbanks Charlie Chaplin and even Sen Thomas Gore of Oklahoma the author's maternal grandfather Yet there's something missing from the narrative of Hollywood: the dramatic pace of Empire the splenetic passion of Burr Part of the problem is a lack of structural variety Vidal can't build Caroline and Blaise Sanford from scratch as he did in Empire so they have no fore ground drama of their own and they therefore merge with all the other characters both fictional and his V41140te4:mtmw40! 40t"194"4'"05141“0'-''4grtomofo0!1- 17 ! i i |
