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Outside magazine, September 1998
Review: Books
Sunset Skies
By Hal Espen
BACKPACKS | BUYING RIGHT | THE OTHER STUFF | BOOKS
 An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America's Future, by Robert D. Kaplan (Random House, $28). "We go westward as into the future," Thoreau wrote, "with a spirit of enterprise and adventure." A wave of new and recent books
suggests that the myth of the American West as a theater of boundless possibilities is being displaced by a new historical vision of a region of harsh limits and Old World-style social conflict. Leading off the current spate is veteran overseas reporter and skeptical easterner Robert D. Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts, The Ends of the
Earth), who is something of an apologist for the idea that the United States must embrace its imperial obligations in the century ahead. Accordingly, Kaplan scans the western horizon for early warning signs of social decay and faltering national identity — symptoms that could mean trouble if Americans fail to develop new ideas about community and patriotism. In spite of
the author's decline-and-fall thesis, his book is essentially a lively policy wonk's travelogue in the venerable spirit of John Gunther's Inside U.S.A. Upon launching west from the Gateway Arch ("I still had no idea what, or even where, St. Louis was," he writes after wandering a city he describes as beset by "urban fragmentation"), Kaplan cruises
through "prosperous pods" and immigrant enclaves in southern California; finds cultural balkanization and looming water starvation along the border with Mexico; and witnesses idyllic scenes and economic selfishness in the booming Northwest. Although he occasionally lapses into drive-by reporting that seems reflexively judgmental, Kaplan has a sharp eye for social truth, and his
encounters with a chorus of eloquent citizens of the West keeps the narrative humming. An Iranian immigrant in Portland, Oregon, for example, sounds very American indeed when he passionately asks, "What is this country that sucks you up and draws out the best in you, and allows you for the first time to be yourself?"
Available at Amazon.com
Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West, by Timothy Egan (Alfred A. Knopf, $25). If An Empire Wilderness comes across like a series of sober sociological dispatches in the manner of The Atlantic Monthly (where Kaplan is a contributing editor), this new book by New
York Times Pacific Northwest correspondent Timothy Egan reads like a collection of cerebral, high-concept outtakes from his newspaper's Sunday magazine. In 15 freestanding chapters, he offers illuminating if miscellaneous explorations of land-use controversies and cultural collisions from Catron County, New Mexico, to Sunnyside, Washington, and points in between. Unlike
Kaplan, Egan is preoccupied with aspects of the West as it has been traditionally understood — a distinct region still enmeshed in legacies from its Indian and pioneer history, and a place where identity is still determined to a large extent by geography and landscape. Thus he looks at the tentative return of the Nez Perce to their lost tribal home on the prairies of eastern
Oregon; hears out a civic booster in Las Vegas who "refers to Vegas as 'a product,' never as a city"; delves into a violent episode in Mormon history; and offers a wry, melancholy tale of ostrich ranching in Colorado. Egan's travel notes never quite gel into a comprehensive vision, but no matter: The West is too big to get between the covers of a single book, and Egan has captured
enough of its essence — "the throwing together of races and backgrounds, the utter disregard for established order, the chaos of opportunity in a wild land" — to make his roundup eminently worth reading.
Available at Amazon.com
The Voyage of the Narwhal, by Andrea Barrett (W. W. Norton, $25). Barrett, winner of the National Book Award for her 1996 story collection Ship Fever (and a former Outside book reviewer), has now written an austere and chilly historical novel that more than
fulfills the reader's chief requirements for such books: that they be convincingly imagined, authoritative in detail, and epic in scope. Barrett gives us an engrossing narrative of a disastrous 1855 voyage of exploration from Philadelphia to the Arctic, and of its repercussions in the lives of several young men and women. The voyage aboard the brigantine Narwhal is an attempt to
discover the fate of an earlier expedition that never returned from the land of the Esquimaux (in the antique spelling Barrett uses) — a harrowing quest that ends in betrayals and broken friendships. The setting may be antiquarian, but the themes Barrett explores could not be more contemporary: Is it folly to test oneself against nature, as Erasmus Wells, the ship's
naturalist, tries to do? What does it mean to "explore" when the place explored is occupied by native people and is no longer virgin territory? ("What discovery men do," one exasperated whaling captain says, is "get lost.") In sum, Barrett's is a beautiful novel, vividly rendering everything from "the astounding cold" of the far north to the dreams, "endless and without
resolution," of a haunted survivor.
Available at Amazon.com
Rebuilding the Indian: A Memoir, by Fred Haefele (Riverhead, $25). Take one 1944-vintage baby boomer undergoing a rueful midlife crisis; add one 1947 Indian motorcycle in rusted, worn-out pieces; throw in a subculture of cunning old-parts dealers and neurotic mechanics. Then make the midlife memoirist a tree
trimmer/unpublished novelist living in Missoula, Montana, who has decided to address his woes by painstakingly restoring that broken-down old Indian. If the writer is as smart and funny as Haefele, the recipe yields a wise, charming true-life tale about learning to balance patience and desire, good luck and bad, and original parts and reproductions. In the end, readers get a
wonderful ride, and Haefele gets everything he wants: a family, a publisher for the novel he'd almost given up on, good times on the open road, and a stunning reborn Indian whose "thunderclap of ignition" produces a "magnificent, window-shattering, wall-sundering bellow."
Available at Amazon.com
Photograph by Clay Ellis
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