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Hollywood’s West: The American Frontier in Film, Television, & History ed. by Peter C. Rollins, John E. O’Connor, and Making the White Man’s Indian: Native Americans and Hollywood Movies by Angela Aleiss (review)

laugh at their credulity, their propensity to overreact, and their ill will toward the feline killer they so gleefully insist on seeing everywhere. Indeed, Wingfield uses humor and small gestures to tell what could have been a darker, more turbulent story. In addition to mountain lion hunters, he affectionately comments on computer gadgets, new-age advice books and self-styled gurus, and the middle-class, midlife anxieties that make people think they need them. Wingfield has surrounded Charlie with the most understanding women (his ex-wife, daughter, current lover, and fantasy crush) this side of a Dickens novel, who recommend books and a guru to ease the distress that Charlie denies. We never forget that Charlie is working out his midlife reckoning in the con­ temporary West. The novel is permeated with his observations about sprawl, traf­ fic, vistas shut off, subtle signs of changing seasons where seasons supposedly do not change, subtle gradations of belonging where long term is measured in years instead of generations. And of course the plot traces the collision of an animal native to California— the mountain lion— and one typical of California— the transplanted human. Though Charlie’s personal problems are resolved happily enough, the issues that Charlie confronts remain. New people still pour into Sacramento. A zoo, however generous its appointments, is no home for a moun­ tain lion. Andrew Wingfield has captured a sense of the pressures we live with in the West and our various responses— grim, funny, self-deluding, sometimes gal­ lant. His novel adds another angle to classic musings over the fate of California.