A Sense of Place

...Reviewed by PEARL K. BELL Contributor, the "New Yorker," New York "Times Book Review" The best thing about John Hunt's ambitious new novel is its powerful sense of place...

...By doing so, John Hunt has reminded us of a crucial area of the Amerioan experience...

...But the heart of the book is the drab town of Grey Horse, Oklahoma, glutted with oil, greed, and cattle, and bone-poor in everything else?as different from Paris and the giddy playgrounds of the Riviera as dust is different from water...

...Even before he knew the town, Thayer "had come to love the Chetopa...

...He falls in love with a beautiful, ravaged Frenchwoman who rejects him, and he sees his mother again, in Europe, for the first time in 30 years...

...His knife honed on the whetstone of New England righteousness, he travels to Grey Horse on his mission of justice...

...Carter orders Cody, whose mind of pulp and killer's physique always obey him, to put the bodies in Rita's bed and burn down the ranch, leaving enough evidence in the truck to engrave their scandalous end on the town's mind forever...

...Yet Carter's indomitable hold over Grey Horse seems more nourished than weakened by his past, and Thayer encounters an almost total indifference in the town as he tries to build his case...

...In his first novel, Generations of Men, and in the Oklahoma sections of The Grey Horse Legacy, John Hunt has dedicated himself to a region and a way of life that are strangely absent from contemporary American fiction...

...Just before his mother forces him to go East to school, at 15, he finds out the truth...

...She goes on living in the inimical town she detests, and she brings up her son in the lie that his father died a hero...

...It takes enormous faith and considerable courage to write, in the 1960s, in the tradition of Hamlin Garland, Willa Cather, and Oliver La Farge...

...Indeed, a white man's zeal to avenge the Indians is a momentous theme for an American novelist who knows this particular stain on our collective memory...

...If Hunt had chosen to write a shorter and more concentrated novel about just this aspect of Oklahoma, such characters as Andrews Thayer, Rita Red Hawk, and Clay Carter might have attained a real measure of recognizable, tragic greatness...

...At the end of the book he brings his mother's body back to Grey Horse, and though everyone he cared about there is dead, he remains in the town to stalk his dim but persistent ghosts on their home ground...

...The final, and much the weakest, section of The Grey Horse Legacy is set in Europe—a traveler's Europe of Saint-Tropez, Paris, and the no man's land of automobiles careening blindly past the anonymous French countryside between the Mediterranean and the capital...

...Thayer believes her smoldering, half-drunken account of Carter's role in the Red Hawk deaths, but at the last minute she refuses to sign the document of accusation that he has drawn up...

...But however sprawling and overcrowded with too many melodramatic events and too many shifting scenes it may be, one oarries away from The Grey Horse Legacy a sense of the land at its core, "a parched land where dust devils writhed in spinning fury, beneath a menacing sky hovering overhead like a vulture...

...a heroic people upon whom had fallen an age of Iron, a warrior people stunned by too many blows so that, like an aging boxer, they fought on only from memory, a vanquished people whose very dreams had been stolen...

...But Thayer's retributive simplicity as an avenging Nemesis begins to falter and stumble against unforeseen human obstacles soon after he comes, with the stern, discontented wife he married "out of his class," and his small son Amory, to live in Grey Horse...

...With Thayer's death, the story passes on to his bedevilled widow, Emily, and her son, but Hunt does not make of them the doom-ridden figures they are meant to be...

...We have urban novelists and Southern novelists, but who any longer pays serious attention in fiction to the prairie, the Southwest, even the West as it was until quite recently...

...Moved beyond endurance by the sad Chetopa history, he welcomes the white man's burden of guilt for the slaughter and decay of the Indians with the anguished zeal of a hound of heaven...

...This is no small achievement...

...As he angrily pleads with her in the cab of a feed truck on Carter's ranch, both Thayer and Rita are shot dead by Carter's freakish sidekick, Cody, a homicidal simpleton living out a True Western Stories hallucination that he is Buffalo Bill...

...For Thayer, the call to Grey Horse is less a job than it is the fulfillment of "a life of planned, willed sacrifice to ideals handed down through his Massachusetts family like heirlooms...

...These huge and quintessential places in the American myth and the American past are curiously neglected by the writers of our time...

...Emily Thayer's only tie with Grey Horse is the empty coffin she buries symbolically in the town cemetery, after the fire has reduced everything to anonymous ashes...

...After Harvard and the War, Amory exiles himself to Europe, and for 20 years he drifts unhappily from one country to another, writing Western novels for a living, marrying and having children with a permanent shrug of indifference, caught in the bitter music of the boyhood home he lost...

...He loved them, and hated what had been done to them...

...Only Carter's wife, Rita Red Hawk, seems willing to help Thayer, who makes the mistake of falling in love with her...

...It is also an uncommon achievement...

...Once a famous ballet dancer whose career came to an end when Carter journeyed to Paris to court her, marry her, and bring her back to Grey Horse, Rita now hates and fears her husband...

...The Commissioner of Indian Affairs in Washington suspects that the Red Hawk murders have been ruthlessly planned by Clay Carter, the dour and mysterious baron of Grey Horse, in order to acquire all the oil-rich land still owned by this Chetopa family, for he is married to a Red Hawk, and his henchman, the local Indian Agent, is married to her sister...

...She convinces Thayer that Carter means to kill her, too, in his grim pursuit of the Chetopa headlights...

...Paris and the South of France have bedazzled the eye of the American beholder in a great deal of American fiction, and Hunt does as well as most by the familiar, poignantly un-American sights and sounds and smells...

...As the people, Indian and white, whose roots are in the raw Oklahoma prairie, live out their separate and collective dooms, their fate seems inexorably bent to the will of a merciless landscape scorched for millennia in the noonday sun...

...Their age of heroism was past . . . but justice he could bring, sharp and glittering as a sword, to redress the balance just a little for a hundred years of treachery...

...yet he had known that he could in no way restore their greatness, nor even their dignity...

...For he understands now that "we were all of us just wild geese in winter, hell bent for someplace we didn't know, driven by something we couldn't understand, following the seasons of the sun to keep our blood warm, trying to find a country to call home...

...Clay Carter, "rancher and merchant, banker and politician, a feudal lord in Stetson hat and Fort Worth boots," is possessed by his own nightmare demons: by the screaming memory of his first wife, a crippled Indian whom he let die in a fire while he rushed to save a mailbag full of stolen money that she was hiding in the barn...

...I wish that John Hunt had been able to dramatize these concluding insights, as he does the grand design in the first part of the book, which contains a moving, very credible world of violent myths, violent weather, violent acts of man...

...He has even taken the great man's name for his own...

...We are asked to believe that somehow Amory's return to Grey Horse, the beloved country, may in time free him of the desperate homesickness that has frozen his ability to feel anything for three decades...

...His deeper commitments, however, are clearly with the vast heartland of a timeless prairie America...

...As it is, they barely begin to take substantial form before they are gone, and those who continue the story tell too much and talk to little purpose, feeling no command from God—or from their fictional creator—either to avenge or to be silent...

...In the 1920s, Andrews Thayer, a young New England lawyer, is sent by the Indian Service to the crude town in northern Oklahoma to investigate the seemingly systematic murder of members of the Red Hawk family, Indians of the Che-topa tribe...

...The last third of the novel is spoken in the voice of Amory, now 45, separated from his terribly "county" English wife...