Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays

September 16, 1996
"The unfortunate truth is that there are few significant works being produced today by the currently popular American Indian fiction writers which examine the meaningfulness of indigenous or tribal sovereignty in the twenty-first century." With that statement, it's evident that Cook-Lynn (Dakota Sioux author of From the River's Edge) doesn't feel a need to ingratiate herself to her compatriots. Politically minded and very outspoken, she criticizes everyone from the U.S. Government (for its racist and oppressive policies) to Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich (for "the sheer commercialism of Crown of Columbus" and especially their stance in The Broken Cord) to Stegner ("There is, perhaps, no American fiction writer who has been more successful in serving the interests of a nation's fantasy about itself than Wallace Stegner"). When not fraught with animosity, her essays are so congested with academic prose that they are very difficult to read. Anyone who doesn't share her view is blasted by her vitriolic pen, and the constant pounding is so relentless that it becomes mind-numbing. As to the book's title: "Stegner's attitude is, without question, the pervasive attitude of white midwesterners whose ancestors marched into a moral void and then created through sheer will the morality that allowed them, much the same way that the contemporary white Dutch South Africans marched into South Africa proclaiming Pretoria, to convince the world that `this is my country.' " These are essays on important issues that need to be explored, but most readers are likely to find them bitter and overwrought.

November 1, 1996
%% This is a multi-book review: SEE also the title "Wallace Stegner." %% Wallace Stegner was a noncelebrity author, historian, teacher, and environmentalist who wanted to be remembered most as a novelist who combined historical perspective with fictional techniques. Benson, the author of a definitive, award-winning biography of John Steinbeck, spent seven years interviewing Stegner and studying his private papers; the result is a pioneering account of another literary lion. The son of a sometime "whiskey-runner," Stegner became a Pulitzer Prize^-winning author, founder of the writing program at Stanford University, and devoted family man who admitted he did not "wake up" to writing until after he had earned his Ph.D. In this engrossing work, Benson offers a portrait of a resilient truth-seeker, steadfast moralist, obsessive realist, and compassionate humanist who became the standard-bearer for western regionalist writing.Popular as Stegner may be, his fans do not include Native American scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, who takes umbrage with Stegner's claim that western history "sort of stopped at 1890," with the massacre at Wounded Knee. She argues in her book's title essay that the indigenous Indian nation did not expire as a result of white colonialism. Rather, she asserts, the violence was a rallying call, a "focal point of survival," the beginning of a glorious history for the Sioux nation. Cook-Lynn attempts to bridge the gap between Native American life and academe by offering erudite political and intellectual arguments to refute what she sees as lack of responsibility in literary studies. Her essays provide powerful arguments for authentic Indian Studies departments, cultural revitalization, and tribal literature critiqued exclusively within Third World "theoretical considerations." ((Reviewed November 1, 1996))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1996, American Library Association.)