William Eastlake (1917–1997)

Very much a work in progress, like it says in the title. This is really five sketches towards a larger work which I assume Eastlake gave up on (it was his last published fiction). The action takes place in and around — mostly around — the author's prep school in the 30's, and we're treated to lots of his trademark wise-ass back-and-forth dialogue, but this time in the mouths of well-off boys rather than Navajo or GI's. The scenarios, are framed by the madness and committal of the Creative Writing teacher, Miss Coca, and the ancient (Civil War vet) Whitmanesque school doctor, and we get glimpses of the depression and the troubles ahead filtered through the halcyon haze of privileged boyhood. It's fine as far as it goes, worth seeking out for fans of Eastlake.

I read two of the six Gerald Haslam stories published "back to back" in this volume and hated both of them.… (més)

Eastlake returns to the Checkerboard Indian country of northwestern New Mexico, the setting of his brilliant so-called trilogy, for a final hangout with the Navajo as White America threatens to explode, flood, develop, sell or otherwise despoil the last of their land from under them. The whiplash dialogue, equally comic and gnomic, is amped up even further now, sometimes wobbling on the verge of self-parody, and the scenes of the author-character and his wife screwing on the floor of their ranch house didn’t do a lot for me. But these are minor quibbles set against (i) the excellence of Eastlake’s satire of this society that hunts eagles with helicopters and stripmines the desert to feed redundant power plants and (ii) his empathy with the Indians, such that there’s never a question of who’s the “other” here.… (més)