Portable Western Reader [Paperback]

Some are well known and easily associated with the West: Wallace Stegner, A. B. Guthrie, Louise Erdrich, John Steinbeck, Edward Abbey, Maxine Hong Kingston, Raymond Carver, Larry McMurtry, Ken Kesey. Many are lesser known and deserving of a wider audience, such as James Galvin, Sherman Alexie, and Linda Hogan. As someone less familiar with the poetry inspired by the region, I appreciated selections from a wide range of poets, including the influential Montana poet Richard Hugo.

Describing the experience of reading this book is like trying to sum up a year traveling in another country. There are several familiar works: Wallace Stegner's great story "Carrion Spring," set on the northern plains during the spring thaw after a horrific winter kill; the opening of Ivan Doig's wonderful Montana memoir "This House of Sky"; Terry Tempest Williams' chilling essay on the rising incidence of breast cancer in her family after above-ground nuclear testing in 1950s Nevada; childhood memories of homesteading in the Nebraska Panhandle, from Mari Sandoz' book about her father, "Old Jules"; a discourse on water from Gretel Ehrlich's essays about ranching in Wyoming, "The Silence of Open Spaces."

There's also Edward Abbey's account of summer work as a park ranger in Utah's Arches National Monument from "Desert Solitaire"; a poignant memory of fishing in Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It"; a brief scene featuring the joyous prankster McMurphy, later immortalized by Jack Nicholson, from Ken Kesey's "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"; a section about a man who stakes a claim on the Wyoming-Colorado border from James Galvin's brilliantly written memoir-novel, "The Meadow"; the evocation of a ghost town and the Nebraska prairie in the opening pages of Wright Morris' novel "Ceremony in Lone Tree"; and one of the many humorous recollections of frontier cowboy Teddy Blue Abbott, as he remembers his friendship with Calamity Jane.

And there are wonderful discoveries. I liked Rick Marinis' short story "Paraiso: An Elegy" about two couples from El Paso on a car trip; Richard Nelson's account of deer hunting in Alaska from "The Island Within"; Raymond Carver's memories of his alcoholic father in "My Father's Life"; Larry McMurtry's demythologizing memories of his cowboy-rancher uncles in "Take My Saddle From the Wall: A Valediction"; Mary Clearman Blew's harrowing memoir of marriage to a wildcat oilman with a terminal pulmonary illness, from "All But the Waltz"; David Long's story of a ranch family's disintegration, "Lightning"; and John Haines' description of nightfall in a remote Alaska cabin in "The Stars, The Snow, The Fire." Among the poets, I found the Hawaiian/LA voice of Garrett Hongo, the dark vision of Robert Wrigley, and the thoughtful ruminations of Montana poet Greg Pape.

Altogether there are voices of all kinds between the covers of this book. You get a sense of great diversity bound together by a vast landscape. There are a few themes that run through most of these selections, which are also common to literature about the West: freedom, loss, and isolation. The expansiveness of the West has traditionally permitted a kind of liberation from what is restrictive and claustrophobic in the settled East. The flip side of that freedom, of course, is the isolation that comes with living lives beyond the reach of other people. Meanwhile, expansion into the West has meant the loss of what was pristine and unexploited; it's meant the loss of Native American cultures; and as the West evolves, it has meant the loss of the frontier itself. Even as we have discovered the West, it is disappearing.

Kittredge's book has captured all that, as well as one can in 600 pages. I heartily recommend his book to anyone interested in the real West, what it was and what it is. As the editor of this anthology, Kittredge has graciously not included anything from his own pen; so I'll recommend his well-written memoir of growing up on a ranch in Oregon, "Hole in the Sky." Two other collections of Western writing I can recommend are "Northern Lights: A Selection of New Writing from the American West," edited by Deborah Clow (currently out of print) and "The Big Sky Reader," edited by Alan Jones (also currently out of print).