As Death Hovers Everclose

The Living, Annie Dillard's first novel, signifies a switch of genres for an established and respected non-fiction writer. Dillard has published collections of essays (including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), an autobiography, books about the craft of writing, and a collection of poems (whose lyrical language she has since deftly applied to prose).

This novel is a "big story," containing many years, pages, characters, and eventually converging plot lines. The Living, the tale of pioneer settlement near Bellingham, Washington, is a traditional epic only in terms of its size. With this novel Dillard has accomplished the writing of a new sort of historical Western--one that sympathetically portrays Native American culture, shows strong women as significant characters of the frontier, and realistically demonstrates what a feat it was simply to survive.

The novel begins with Ada Fishburn's arrival on the beach of Puget Sound in 1855. Ada survives husbands and children. She mourns that her son, who was run over by wagon wheels on the journey west, was "a beloved son that God of all people should know about." Dillard demonstrates the impact that repeated infant death had on mothers. Her telling of these and other events from a woman's point of view is refreshing.

Ada participates in and watches the invasion of white settlers. She sees settlers arrive and flee, and children and parents die from disease and the perils of frontier life. Towns boom and bust. Chinese immigrants, forbidden from owning land, are herded onto boats, sent back to San Francisco or the sea. Natives of the Lummi, Skagit, and Nooksack tribes are confined to reservations, killed by diseases brought by white settlers, or partially assimilated into the new culture.

Minta Horner is another woman who survives the death of children and a husband. Minta befriends several natives of the Nooksack tribe and eventually becomes foster-mother to three Nooksack children. Dillard offers a slice of native culture by creating white characters who are sympathetic to native positions and friends of tribal members.

An interesting exchange occurs when Minta's husband, Eustace, asks a Nooksack, Kulshan Jim, why Nooksacks treat their women like pack mules. Kulshan Jim counters, asking why white settlers hit their women. "A Nooksack who struck a woman would be disgraced, [Kulshan Jim] asserted with some vehemence; the woman would return, with her wealth, to her family; the man would have to quit the tribe." Eustace finds no way to respond.

The story of Beal Obenchain, a murderer who reads Goethe and the writings of Oliver Cromwell, is evidence of evil and dementia among the settlers. The portrayal of human imperfection on the frontier further distinguishes this novel from traditional Westerns.

The number of characters in The Living and their lack of development is one of the novel's weaknesses. With so many people, appearing in intermittent chapters, the reader sometimes feels detached from the characters. At times the novel seems disjointed and the reader forgets plot lines, but the strengths of the novel make up for this flaw.

Dillard obviously did meticulous research for The Living. And she does what she does best--prose writing of melodious precision. (As Ada dies she feels that it "had been her privilege to peer into the deepest well-hole of life's surprise. She felt the fire of God's wild breath on her face.")

The complex theme of The Living centers on a human's desires and ability to survive. The tragedies and defeats in The Living, bracketed by joyful homecomings and births, are so numerous that the reader has little time to absorb one emotion before being hit by another. The novel demonstrates both how alive life is and how little control humans have over death. The Living shows how human spirituality can make death easier to bear and somehow more acceptable. The novel also implies admiration for the fact that humans continue to believe in spite of their helplessness.

The extremes of sorrow and joy shown in The Living may be part of Dillard's accurate portrayal of frontier life. The reader becomes almost immune to any happiness in the novel for fear--and the knowledge that--death or tragedy hovers everclose. Pioneers, quite possibly, felt the same way. Thus, Dillard's novel is aptly titled. Pioneers may have been sad, they may have laughed, they may have nigh-moved mountains; but for every minute pioneers existed, they were "the living." And they were aware of, and rejoiced in, that simple fact.

Moira Ambrose Connelly was a free-lance writer living in Knoxville, Tennessee when this article appeared.

The Living. By Annie Dillard. Harper Collins, 1992. $22.50 (cloth).