New Machines, Old Values
FREIDMAN, JOSEPH J.
New Machines, Old Values These Same Hills. By E. R. Zeitlow. Knopf. 252 pp. $2.95. Reviewed by Joseph J. Friedman Editor, "Venture" ; Contributor, "Mademoiselle" IF THE MECHANIZED orgy in which...
...The new vision was an economic one, without moral and spiritual accompaniment...
...It is a melancholy story of a changing landscape, most compelling when the somber atmosphere of the wasteland is backdrop to the drama, and bittersweet in its evocation of a slipping time when solid values have given way to glib expediency...
...For within himself was an area where he could quietly be his own—be a man by not letting what they said change him...
...But the lapses are rare...
...This is the theme of Zeitlow's story and...
...That may be the safest ground, with no sure footing, for a man to be on...
...he is a stubborn man who shuns the "big" city, Aureole, 40 miles away, because its bustling transformations are alien to him...
...gadgetry...
...Seen wholly, lovingly...
...close to the Badlands, alone, mumbling to himself in a timeless world, sharing his secrets with an old lugubrious horse named Barney, a name taken from the song Barney Google...
...The machine, like the heedless wind, dumps its benefits indiscriminately upon all...
...He cannot truly mourn the passing of the old: the old must die...
...The story's suspense hangs on Rudolph's compulsion to catch a particularly cunning coyote which not only eludes his traps, but upsets them...
...In this noteworthy first novel by E. R. Zeitlow, it is the Badlands of South Dakota ("a region where erosion had created such a tortuous landscape that it was almost impossible for someone trying to ride there to maintain a sense of distance and direction") which is the luckless host...
...the story evolves essentially out of character and rich local color, and with those figures who intrigue the writer ( Rudolph, especially) there is a recreation of intense immediacy illuminated by keen insight...
...His obsession with this strange adversary calls to mind Hemingway's Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea, and, like Santiago, Rudolph is "driven out beyond where he has been before, out to where no one can help him...
...Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel is the Bible at his bedside...
...And the new...
...They did not establish in the people a new kind of integrity...
...His success or failure is much less important, however, than his dedication to the mission...
...Zeitlow's next novel will be worth waiting for...
...that single-mindedness holds the pathos and the inspiration...
...He is the eldest of three children in a household which has succumbed to conventional trappings: Time, TV, Norman Vincent Peale...
...The new machines and new ways brought with them no new wisdom...
...These Same Hills is a tale of rural upheaval, told here with freshness and vigor in the relationship between a 74-year-old covote trapper, one of the last of the old-time bounty hunters, and Jim Heiss...
...He is torn between a yearning for what he feels to be worthy — devotion, belief, search, truth, all of which are awkwardly out of place in the world he inhabits— and his inability to abide a valueless existence...
...He is more disgusted with it than angered, for it ". . . didn't care about truth—or about lies...
...Rudolph lives "out there...
...How Rudolph copes with his adversary, and the measure of his "success," is something the reader will want to follow himself...
...There is nowhere for him to turn but to the doubtful chasm of himself, and at the awareness of this "he was overcome by a sense of aloneness which he tried at first not to recognize—but then suddenly embraced...
...reflective...
...His parents are farmers but call themselves ranchers...
...bookish...
...there is status in the term...
...occasionally, he is too directly concerned with the concept, conspicuous and intrusive...
...Reviewed by Joseph J. Friedman Editor, "Venture" ; Contributor, "Mademoiselle" IF THE MECHANIZED orgy in which we live has brought the stars almost within reach, it is little wonder that no earthly wilderness has escaped its clanking pervasion...
...And it is that involvement with what may be a "worthless" end, alongside the commonplace attitude of accommodating to a meaningless practicality, which is at the poignant center of the young man's dilemma...
...his 18-year-old disciple...
...Jim, through whose sensibilities the narrative unfolds, is a studious youngster...
...Rudolph, the coyote trapper, strange and legendary, is the focus of the novel...
Vol. 43 • November 1960 • No. 44
