Robert Boschman. In the Way of Nature: Ecology and Westward Expansion in the Poetry of Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Bishop and Amy Clampitt

Abstract

on. And its author makes some excellent choices. He lifts Richard Price from the crime writing section, for instance, reading Lush Life as the smart, sophisticated novel that it is (the actual crime case at the core of the novel, O’Donnell argues, just serves as “the germinating seed for entanglement of desires, lies, motives, stories, and disavowals that brings together dozens of characters into an ad hoc community” [55]). The author reads Edward P. Jones’s quietly marvelous The Known World as a deceptively simple example of realist historical fiction and then exposes its metafictional, metahistorical subtext. Jones’ novel, O’Donnell shows, “suggests the degree to which the past lives on in the present, and is only separable as ‘epoch’ by virtue of the questionable fiction of historical progress” (146). And The American Novel Now gives Chang-rae Lee his due and his language “that is at once alien and native, possessed by none, and by all” (202). But again, the chapter raises questions rather than answering them. O’Donnell only discusses Lee’s most predictably ‘ethnic’ debut novel Native Speaker, leaving the author’s later works (such as the magisterial Aloft) as unexamined as Lee’s larger and complex project to move what some call multicultural American literature to a new, 21st century level. It is a characteristic pattern. O’Donnell makes discoveries. But he doesn’t have the time to make them come alive. There’s something to be said for the rushed approach (in order to save the novel, an endangered species, we may have to count the last of these big, quiet animals as quickly as possible). However, since the complex beauty of the individual work of art needs more than a few rushed paragraphs, it would be fascinating to see what O’Donnell, a passionate reader, would do with more time on his hands.