Local Flavor

Wildcat File Photo Arizona Daily Wildcat

At the Wildcat, we understand your ambitions and offer glimpses of two books by UA faculty to help save face with your mother. Our review begins with a local story by Bob Houston, Director of the UA Creative Writing Department, republished this year in paperback by the University of Arizona Press.

In 1917, Phelps Dodge copper mines employees and sympathizers in Bisbee, Arizona went on strike for shorter hours, higher wages and better working conditions. On the morning of July 12, 1917, after repeated efforts by management to force laborers back to work, Cochise County Sheriff Harry Wheeler deputized 1,200 men -"the largest posse ever" - and descended through the streets of Bisbee arresting strikers on charges of vagrancy, treason and disturbing the peace.

Twelve-hundred strikers were rounded up and forced on board freight and cattle cars and sent 175 miles across the desert into New Mexico. There, in the New Mexican desert, the strikers were dumped off and left to starve.

Houston retells the story in his historical fiction Bisbee '17 ($15.95), re-released by UA Press in paperback twenty years after its first publication by Pantheon in 1979. Houston says the publishers who handle the paperback rights to his more recent volumes balked at republishing it because of the title. Bisbee '17? It sounds like half a football score.

Thankfully, UA Press thought differently, and took on this ambitious book despite the title. A 1979 New York Times review states that Houston's story brings the ugly fact of the Bisbee deportation "excitingly to life." He does so with an elusively straightforward narrative, chopping the story into character-driven chapters. The story's bias is ambivalent; both sides of the labor dispute use indelicate means to get what they want.

The feats of this book are too numerous to pin down. It captures the language and values of the region and the era, packing it all into a narrow but highly nuanced story line. The characters are like friends you revisit because they are more interesting than most people. It's a good book and an important story, one worth putting on any summer reading list.

Elizabeth Evans' Carter Clay (HarperFlamingo, $24.00) is the story about a Vietnam veteran's hit-and-run accident with an Arizona family traveling to Florida. Carter Clay works as a cook in a Florida roadside diner and attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He's on the path to some kind of recovery, though it could be from many things. He runs into Finis Pruitt, whom you can compare to Iago from Shakespeare's Othello, except Finis is more like any guy you know who tries to get you to do stuff you shouldn't do and then tries to kill you. Finis gets Carter drunk and they go driving. They get into an accident with Arizona paleontologists Joe and Katherine Alitz and their teenage daughter Jersey, and Carter leaves the scene. He then surrenders to his guilt enough to visit the family in the hospital.

Elizabeth Evans, UA professor of creative writing, tells an otherwise ghastly story with sneaky and satisfactory changes of scene, all-knowing, from-the-hip narration and an unstaunched willingness to poke holes in her characters and describe the ooze. Carter Clay is a fine shot of southern Gothic prose or Arizona rye. However you want to call it, Carter Clay delivers a rewarding read that isn't forgotten when the book is set down.