Books: Wordy Way West

SPIRIT LAKE (957 pp.)—MacKin/ay Kantor—World ($6.95).

Not altogether inaccurately, MacKinlay Kantor’s 34th book is billed as a “gigantic novel of the American frontier.” Wordier even than Andersonville, Kantor’s massive 1956 Pulitzer prizewinner. Spirit Lake is distended by a cast of more than four dozen major characters cursed with total recall and the folksiest dialect since Mr. Dooley. (“Well sakes!” says one. “Course, I ain’t had a touch of shakes since two years agone, and I do firmly believe that it was because I et three hard-boiled eggs on Good Friday last year, and again this year.”) For 791 pages, the only visible aim of his subplots is to pin them down for the 1857 Iowa massacre of the book’s title.

Novelist Kantor can write tight narrative when he is not homespinning, and the massacre is in fact one of the book’s few compelling sequences. Venting an obscure grudge against the white man, an outlawed band of Wahpekute Indians fall upon the settlement at Spirit Lake, kill, rape and pillage with an abandon that is both innocent and perverse, sickening yet oddly touching. As they struggle across the plains with their useless loot and four near-useless white women, the fleeing Indians are never horse-opera savages doomed by impersonal history. Instead, they epitomize a decadent viciousness that was as much the enemy of their own people as white civilization.

Such insights are rare in Spirit Lake; it seldom suggests the piercing hardships and exaltations that made the way West so enduring an influence on the American imagination and character. To Kantor’s pioneers, the lure of the unknown is the expectation of gain: “Something waiting, way out there . . . like a woman, or a foundry, or a chicken-pickery.” For a native lowan, Kantor is curiously infelicitous in describing even the look of the land. “The snow,” he writes, “was a pale woman whom you might have loved one time, but now she was dead.” And for all their ’twases and sakes-aliving, his characters seldom seem alive, even by the standards of historical costume drama.