31 6
JOE .DAVID BELLAMY
corny mysticism, or the cheap thrill of blood on the carpet.
One may readily feel sympathy with the strong antibourgeois strain
in Shepard. In "Mr. and Mrs. Sizzler," for instance, he paints a pastoral
scene of a quiet family barbeque in Hollywood Hills - - then "BLAM!
the house blows up." But there is a difference between antibourgeois art
and the glorification of bloodlust and necrophilia. Maybe the bloodlust
and necrophilia is simply a pose to shock Nixon-lovers everywhere; but
in this hairy culture in the 1970s, how can we be sure Shepard is really
joking?
If
his intent is to take potshots at the culture, he usually fails to
strike home, it seems to me, because too frequently his understanding of
the culture seems simplistic, or the targets of his animosity seem so
stiffly stereotyped, nothing but straw men to mow down. Who
doesn't
hate American "tourists" or "backyard barbequers" or an occasional
"nurse" - - on principle. Stereotypes are easy to hate, but is this what
we need? We have all become "connoisseurs of anti-Americanism"; we
have such a lot of it to choose from. Why rig a fictional America that is
nothing but
a justification for violent destruction?
If
the bad guys in
Hawk Moon
are straw men, the good guys are
\
monsters. Unlike our best neo-Gothic writers such as, say, Joyce Carol
Oates (who is so much more than neo-Gothic, who is unclassifiable),
Shepard, gifted as he undeniably is, creates no moral or philosophical
\
distance from his characters; and the characters are not merely sinister or
amoral; they are enthusiastically evil. Frequently they gloat in their
crimes; they are sexually excited by the very idea of violent death or
destruction. They are fascinated by the abomination, but the abomina-
tion is no longer abominable for them. At times, the Shepard of
Hawk
Moon
seems to have embraced the ghoulishness and sadism of media–
distorted aspects of the culture he wishes to attack and rationalized it as
Indian lore and the wisdom of savagery, a bizarre interpolation.
If
Charles Manson could write fiction,
Hawk Moon
is what it might look
like -- there is so much hate and incredible mixed up voodoo in this book.
Gordon Weaver's strong suit is his ability to enter into his charac–
ters' bloodstreams without spilling ... blood or what have you. In more
or less conventional, sustained forms in
The Entombed Man of Thule,
his
fiction is marked by sympathy, coherence, verbal magic, strong
ch~rac
terizations, and compelling feats of imagination.
The perhaps unconscious unifying metaphor for the collection is
found
in
the title story. The narrator, deserted by his "pretty wife,"
agonizes late at night in his empty house while a spectacular ice storm
encases the city; " ... fifty thousand homes are without power." Pro–
jecting his grief, the narrator's mind fastens on the image of "the
