Reading Aridity in Western American Literature eds. by Jada Ach and Gary Reger (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Reading Aridity in Western American Literature eds. by Jada Ach and Gary Reger
• Rachel L. Carazo

Jada Ach and Gary Reger, eds., Reading Aridity in Western American Literature. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020. 296 pp. Hardcover, $133; e-book, $45.

Jada Ach and Gary Reger's edited volume, Reading Aridity in Western American Literature, aims to explore the desert's nuances in literary works to demonstrate how the cultural and social imagination about deserts needs drastic transformation. The volume achieves this aim of "reexamining the diverse ways that arid landscapes have shaped both American and global environmental imaginaries from the nineteenth century to today" (2). Moreover, rather than just examining "the desert" through a single perspective, each of the chapters provides a unique way of "seeing" that counteracts previous, barren ways of discussing and viewing the arid world.

Both editors' backgrounds well-position them for leading the volume. Ach specializes in literature and linguistics, and Reger studies (ancient) deserts. They facilitate an interdisciplinary and innovative [End Page 381] approach to real and imagined deserts that invites readers to reconsider what deserts mean and how their multifaceted nature can be integrated into contemporary society. Their overarching argument is that deserts have not only been overlooked in fiction but also in nonfiction and ecocritical writings that neglect the "many cases [of] mounting threats" that affect the US Southwest (3).

The volume is organized into three main sections. In the first part the overarching themes are identity and belonging. In Chapter One Amy T. Hamilton explores three novels—Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991), Rudolfo Anaya's Alburquerque (1992), and Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife (2015)—and discusses the inequality and exploitation inherent in (federal) desert water management regimes and politics, highlighting the problematic and often dystopian aspects that result from "planned communities" in arid environments with the aim of inspiring real-life change (35). In Chapter Two Quinn Grover reveals the paradoxes of "community and individualism" (46) in Elmer Kelton's The Time It Never Rained (1973): the paradigms of "the Western" do not neatly coincide with real environmental and communal devastation, yet the characters' natures and their claims to protect the community allow readers to ignore inconsistencies and the "inherent tension between the arid western landscapes in which Westerns are set and the metanarratives of the West as frontier and individualist paradise" (48). Thus Grover's examination reveals the dangers of imprecisely reading desert narratives and neglecting their ambiguities, which lead to misperceptions about the ecological and social realities of arid landscapes.

Chapter Three presents Cordelia Barrera's analysis of haunting and trauma in Arturo Islas's The Rain God (1984). Using American Gothic aesthetics and a critical regionalist perspective, Barrera demonstrates how the desert compels characters like Miguel Chico to reflect on trauma and belonging. Specifically, Chico has a "longing for and terror of the desert" (67) that obliges him to address history, sin, fear, and sexuality so that he can reach toward "healing, renewal, and a lifting of disruptive [modernist, colonialist] practices" in the arid environment (69), a "postmodern ethics of place" (68). In Chapter Four Zachary R. Hernandez explores settler-colonialist [End Page 382] themes in three Willa Cather novels—The Song of the Lark (1915), The Professor's House (1925), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927). While the novels' discourses transform over their twelve-year production, Hernandez's conclusion is that the "discoverers (Tom), artists (Thea), and modernizers (Father Latour)" ultimately promote white needs over Indigenous ones (88), with the novels "exoticizing, objectifying, erasing, and appropriating 'Indianness' as a trope for the growth of [Cather's] settler-colonial protagonists" who are depicted as better and better utilizers of the landscape (89).

The second section focuses on the agencies and impacts of physical structures and (discarded) objects in the desert. In Chapter Five Jada Ach examines Cather's The Professor's House (1925) in conjunction with the 1920s construction of highways to consider how depictions of masculinity were impacted by desert infrastructure. Ach finds that even as men were admired for "conquering" deserts, "roadbuilding in the desert Southwest both generates narratives of white triumph (over resources, peoples, and 'waste') while also...