Letters from Yellowstone By Diane Smith Viking, $23.95 ISBN 0670886319 Review by Carolyn Porter Constructed as a series of letters and set in the majestic surroundings of the American West with its big open sky of opportunity, Letters from Yellowstone tells the story of a young medical student, Alexandria Bartram. Mistakenly assumed to be a boy by the professor in charge of a scientific expedition, she sets off for Mammoth Hot Springs, Montana, to aid the expedition and follow her passion for botany. Once the scientists learn to accept a feminine presence in camp, Alex begins to form relationships and connections with people and nature that further her self-worth and individuality.

Yet this is not simply the trite tale of a girl striking off on a journey who, in the process, grows up. It is a coming of age novel, but since it is told from many perspectives, a unique voice emerges to show what it means to be human, to grow up. At first Alex is overcome by the beauty of the landscape. She observes upon first viewing Yellowstone, It is as though I have traveled back in time, to the very edge of the universe, where the earth, still in its most primordial stage, sputters and bubbles and spews out the very origins of life. This childlike wonder soon turns to respect for the amazing splendor of this natural world, respect for the soul of man, and in turn respect for whatever force Alex believes created it all.

Colorful characters pepper this first novel. Professor Howard Merriam, a gentle, flustered man with spectacles; Joseph, a Crow Indian; the misogynistic driver; Dr. Rutherford and his pet raven; wise Mrs. Eversman, the birdwatcher all add spice to Alex’s adventure. She learns something from each of them, and above all learns to be open-minded to all perspectives of life.

Smith concludes with a rather existential theme: People should follow their own unique purpose in life, whatever that may be according to their world view. We must each take charge of our own beliefs, yet always accept the opinions of others. In the end, Alex remarks, I am beginning to see that I need to learn how to recognize what is good and kind and true in each individual’s view of the world. And with this realization, she is grown-up.

Veteran novelist Howard Fast shows his versatility as a storyteller with his latest work, Redemption, which combines several popular genres into a no-frills entertainment that will undoubtedly please his many fans.

The novel opens with New York detectives searching the Wall Street offices of murdered broker William Sedgewick Hopper, shot once through the back of the head as he was about to sign a $1,000,000 check. There are many clues in the case which soon reveal that Hopper was quite corrupt and ruthless in his financial practices. He was a much-hated man under the growing scrutiny of the law.

A month earlier, Ike Goldman, a 78-year-old retired law professor from Columbia University, comes to the rescue of a much younger woman, Elizabeth Hopper, as she is about to take a suicidal plunge from one of New York City’s most celebrated bridges. Something clicks reluctantly between this distraught young woman and the compassionate senior. It is to Fast’s credit that this May-December relationship is handled with a simple, tasteful restraint, rather than the usual dirty-old-man leering approach. He makes their emotional union seem as natural as breathing, without the slightest hint of lewdness or vulgarity.

Despite the warning of several friends, Goldman opens his life to Liz, as he calls her, deeply touched by this vibrant woman who has reached out to him. She, in turn, is won over by his generosity and compassion for her troubled life. He gives to her without asking anything in return. While sex is an important glue in most relationships, it is the shared spiritual, emotional awakening that both people experience that strengthens their bond.

All of that is shattered with the murder of her husband, the infamous Mr. Hopper, who she later confesses beat and abused her viciously. With his trademark clean, uncluttered prose, Fast saves his best work for the courtroom drama that unfolds in the latter part of the book. If there is a defect, it is that this portion of the story is somewhat rushed, not giving the reader the full benefit of the suspense generated here. That is heightened when Liz’s defense team suffers a few setbacks during the proceedings, offering every indication things will end badly for the woman.

Regardless of the occasional abruptly ended scene or slight stiffness in some of the dialogue, Redemption continues the lengthy career of Howard Fast with great distinction. It is the perfect book for a relaxing afternoon at the beach, deftly entertaining but never challenging or too demanding.

Robert Fleming is a journalist in New York City.

Somewhere, come July 21, Ernest Hemingway will be celebrating his 100th birthday. In less ethereal realms, the celebrations, or preparations for them, already have begun. In April, at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, a gaggle of high-profile writers gathered to debate the wisdom of posthumously publishing manuscripts that authors leave behind, such as is being done now with Hemingway’s True at First Light. (Their consensus: not wise at all.)

Elsewhere, around the time of his natal day, the celebrations will start in earnest (no pun, et cetera) in places associated with Hemingway: his hometown of Oak Park, Illinois; Petoskey, Michigan, where his family had a summer home; Piggott, Arkansas, the family home of Hemingway’s second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, where he wrote much of A Farewell to Arms; Key West, site of his most famous residence; and the area of Sun Valley/Ketchum, Idaho, where the author departed this life in 1961 via a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head.

Is all the celebrating warranted? After all, the professoriate laid the ax to the base of this mighty oak in the 1970s and just about succeeded in bringing Hemingway’s reputation down. Postmodernists, feminists, and assorted other academicists took exception to his public persona and private failings and threw the art out with the artist: misogynist, they called him, and war lover, promoter of blood sports, boor, bully, drunk, anti-Semite, self-promoter, womanizer, betrayer of wives and friends.

Well, nobody’s perfect. On the other hand, all he did was help change the way we perceive our existence — a shift of continental proportions — and, even more, the way we express that perception. His great achievement is his plain, telegraphic prose, learned as a newspaperman, a medium that perfectly reflected its message. A generation or more of hopeful writers strove to imitate that style.

Hemingway was part of a time, before the book culture broke down, when writers could be heroes and young men and young women set them as their models. Hundreds of thousands may admire John Updike today, but few try to write like him and no one wants to be him (aside from possibly Nicholson Baker). James Jones, for example, not only imitated Thomas Wolfe, he seemed to want to be him. And almost everybody with literary pretensions wanted to be Hemingway.

Some of this imitation was good and some bad. I happen to think one of the best is Signed with Their Honour, a 1942 novel by the Australian James Aldridge. Hemingway himself could write bad Hemingway with the best of them, notably in Across the River and into the Trees (wickedly parodied by E.B. White in an essay, “Across the Street and into the Grill.”) Even For Whom the Bell Tolls, while a great novel, borders on self-parody.

Some say that, aside from a few short stories, Hemingway wrote only one work of towering stature, The Sun Also Rises. I say you must add to that A Farewell to Arms and, one floor down, For Whom the Bell Tolls — and throw in The Old Man and the Sea, which spurred his being awarded the Nobel Prize, for good measure.

Two big things Hemingway challenged — old values and old ways of expressing them. That is why Sun begins with a long discussion of Robert Cohn, a relatively minor character. Cohn represents the false, romantic values that Hemingway attacks, using Romero, a young bullfighter, as his chief instrument.

Hemingway called Farewell his Romeo and Juliet. It is both a wonderful love story and, together with All Quiet on the Western Front (published in the same year, 1929), one of the century’s first great antiwar novels.

If Hemingway was bad at anything in his great novels, it was dialogue. But his narrative style, with that deceptively lulling repetition of “and,” is justly adulated. A too-brief excerpt from Farewell: “In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees.”

Plain and simple, so plain and simple it would seem to be unexceptionable. Yet it was like nothing that had gone before, and it changed everything. Now that the vogue for imitating him is past, his like will not be seen again. And that, my children, is the real reason he deserves to be called Papa.

The challenge of writing a modern Southern novel must be daunting. After all, what remains to be uncovered? There are the familiar narrative landmines of racial subplots, off-kilter aunts, small-town characters, and the trauma of growing up in a world and a region that just doesn’t make sense to most adults and certainly not to a sensitive, aware ten-year-old boy. In his second novel, Tommy Hays, a native of Greenville, South Carolina, steps right into the fray, taking the genre and infusing it with a direct, understated honesty all his own.

In the Family Way begins in Greenville with the seminal event in Jeru Lamb’s world: the death of his older brother, Mitchell. It is an event that sends Jeru’s otherwise normal mother to embrace Christian Science for solace, convinces his father to quit his steady job at an advertising agency to devote himself with equal zealotry to literary ambitions, and casts a bizarre, tragic pall over three generations of the Lamb family in general. Jeru, it seems, must learn to deal with the loss in his own way. Then, with his mother’s unexpected pregnancy a development strongly against her doctor’s orders Jeru suddenly has more fears of loss to confront.

Told through Jeru’s eyes, Hays’s novel tackles the daunting task of presenting a believable young narrator clever enough to relate an engaging story while not being so wise that the author’s voice seeps through. Hays does a credible job. We may never fully accept Jeru as merely a young boy limited by what someone his age would know, but at the same time readers will relish the particular youthful integrity Jeru brings to the search for meaning in his world. This act of creating such a memorable and convincing narrator is where In the Family Way succeeds, and it separates Hays from the rush of recent Southern fiction. At its best moments, the novel contains too much truth to be merely a novel. At times there is so much veracity in the choices, the words, and the decisions Hays makes, readers will find themselves wondering how much of this fiction is based on fact. How much of Tommy Hays can be found in the touching, engaging story of Jeru Lamb? After all is done, perhaps that is the sign of success in fiction, creating a character who lives in our thoughts after the last page is read.

Todd Keith is a freelance writer and website manager.

Julia Glass, winner of the National Book Award for Three Junes, is back with an achingly personal tale of sisters, I See You Everywhere. Readers come to know Louisa, traditional and accomplished, and Clement, wild seductress and animal lover, through vignettes without any clear structure, but which unerringly show us their disparate priorities and personalities. Despite their common upbringing, the two women are more different than alike. When apart, they seem to regard each other as casually as old college roommates, and when together, they only occasionally connect on a personal level. Their individual tragedies are as standard as boyfriend troubles, pregnancy scares and sibling rivalry, and as serious as near-fatal accidents and cancer. Though their surface concern for each other can be puzzling at times, it is when we find the small gems in Glass’ prose that we realize how deeply these sisters are connected, and how authentic their relationship is.

The story’s 25-year span gives us long views of the sisters’ changing circumstances, from aspirations to jobs, from romances to marriage and children, and from dreams and ideologies to the reality of making a living and attempting to make a difference in the world, and we come to know the characters almost without being aware of it.

While Glass’ fluid writing style allows for moments of genuine beauty in language, it is not until the final quarter of the book that readers will realize how emotionally invested in the characters they’ve become, after the plot takes a startling, heartbreaking hairpin turn. Suddenly the apparently unrelated vignettes of Louisa and Clem’s lives make sense, and readers realize where Glass has been taking them, expertly, the whole time. It is that subtle, relentless seduction that makes I See You Everywhere a worthy and inevitable addition to Glass’ body of work.

Kristy Kiernan, author of Matters of Faith, writes from southwest Florida.