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 A regional writer has the merits and the faults of his kind. His or her world is an exotic one and the writer brings us messages of variable value from it. Sometimes the report is too esoteric to mean much. Percy avoids this although he can teeter on the edge. This is a book very worth the intelligent reader’s attention and marks the debut of a fascinating new young author.
Reviewed by Bob Williams
The Language of Elk
by Benjamin Percy
Carnegie Mellon University Press
2006, ISBN 0-88748-454-9, $16.95, 184 pages
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The author, whose first book this is, is visiting assistant professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee.
There are eight stories in this collection. Many of them deal with the problems that children have with parents, largely because the parents have serious difficulties with each other. The death of the mother in the opening story ‘Unearthed’ gives the young boy’s (the narrator) father problems which the boy can perceive but cannot assess or prevent. Most of the stories are told by someone, and all of the stories are set in rural or small town Oregon.
In one such small town a former football hero and present loser sets off explosions that send a small anvil (named the iron moth and this gives the story its title) from a butte near the town. He and his friend do this for their own amusement and the entertainment of the locals. It is with this pointless activity as a background that the narrator allows his friend to take his place with the woman on whom he has always had a crush.
In the title story a successful owner of a hunting ranch where the patrons pay $5,000 each for an almost guaranteed successful adventure himself plays a part for the patrons but also for his alienated wife and their autistic daughter. It becomes clear the protagonists of Percy’s stories, rich or poor, are almost always losers.
Percy uses objective narration for two of the stories. The closing story ‘Swans’ adds little to his theme. It’s a story of adolescent lust, disappointment, and inappropriate action. But the other story ‘Winter’s Trappings’ occupies a different plane. A wife flees from an abusive husband with her son to her strong sister and her twin daughters. The boy is several years younger than they and they protect him against the predatory young males of the school in which he now finds himself. On the journey to the sister’s home, the mother had hit a stag and this animal had fallen into the back of her pickup. The deer proves to have survived the impact and the sister, a vet, heals him. Attempts to return him to the wild fail and the deer becomes a harmless companion of the family. The abusive husband appears, is given and fails an undeserved second chance and the mother divorces him. The son has ambivalent feelings towards his father but recognizes the correctness of his mother’s action. A kind of healing for the boy (Gordon) takes place at a communal burning of discarded Christmas trees. “[A]nd as the fire grew hotter the night grew brighter and brighter still, as bright as day, and the air burned so you would have thought spring had arrived, and with it, the Chinook winds, which would one day rot the snow blanket covering the ground, making tongue noises as ice quickened into water, forming holes, exposing the brown grass that would grow greener as the holes grew larger until finally all the white would evaporate in gentle heat waves that would reorganize into puffy white clouds that would look, to Gordon, like some part of heaven.”
What is important here is not what happens but how Percy writes of it. He defines the events cleanly, he places his actors expertly on stage, and describes their words and motions with impressive clarity. Most of his stories are good but this story is great.
A regional writer has the merits and the faults of his kind. His or her world is an exotic one and the writer brings us messages of variable value from it. Sometimes the report is too esoteric to mean much. Percy avoids this although he can teeter on the edge. This is a book very worth the intelligent reader’s attention and marks the debut of a fascinating new young author.
About the Reviewer: Bob Williams is retired and lives in a small town with his wife, dogs and a cat. He has been collecting books all his life, and has done freelance writing, mostly on classical music. His principal interests are James Joyce, Jane Austen and Homer. His book Joyce Country, a guide to persons and places, can be accessed at: http://www.grand-teton.com/service/Persons_Places
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