Geary Hobson. Plain of Jars and

Other Stories. East Lansing. Michigan

State University Press. 2011. xiv + 245

pages. $29.95. isbn 978-0-87013-998-7

Geary Hobson’s thoughtful introduction

to Plain of Jars cites the influence

of Katherine Anne Porter, but

the collection seems more reminiscent

of Ernest Hemingway’s In Our

Time. Both collections portray “a

particular person . . . involved in

an episode of his or her life . . .

caught, for a moment in a manner

that signals a turning point.” A short

story, Hobson adds, “is a segment,

or chapter, of a person’s life that can

be rendered in one scene or several.”

Roughly two-thirds of the stories

in the collection conform to this

description, and almost all follow the

progress of a Marine from boot camp

until some forty years after the action

(in one case, the ex-Marine is a minor

figure in the background). Although

he has various names—Lawson,

Rollins, Darysaw, Wayne, Steve—

and the episodes are sometimes in

first person, sometimes in third, the

character is identified and identifies

himself as Indian, though as a

mixed-blood he doesn’t look it and

is questioned about why he doesn’t

act like everyone else. He feels the

call of home—usually Arkansas—

but knows, as at the end of “Shin

Splints,” that “it could never be the

same for him as it once was.”

Most of the time, the central

character reacts rather than acts: to

the thoughtless racism in an overheard

monologue that prompts his

decision to return home rather than

go to San Francisco and sample the

white world; to the insistent evangelist

in “The Odor of Dead Fish”

who leads him to abandon the last

vestiges of Christianity; to the martinet

lieutenant who orders the needless slaughter of

elephants, and, on a larger scale, to

the destruction of irreplaceable Laotian

artifacts by the U.S. military that

parallels the Corps of Engineers’

bulldozing of ceremonial mounds

in Arkansas. Both point to “typical

American wastefulness.”

Although the focal character

finds comfort in the rare presence

of other Natives, Hobson does not

further the myth of Indian nobility,

savage or not. In several stories, characters

destroy themselves and others.

One, “the Laguna prima donna,”

dogs the central character until his

new girlfriend backhands her,

“woman to woman.” Apparently this

gets her attention, for in a subsequent

story she is friendly and supportive.

Hobson is particularly critical of professional

Indians, like Wounded Knee

wannabes in “A Christmas Story”

and the drunken, wife-beating pseudopoet

in “Hollow Horn.”

But “Hollow Horn” and what

Hobson calls “fantasies”—all of them

satiric—seem less successful (some

based on premises whose conclusions

soon become apparent) than those

stories involving Marines. And they

lack the precision of language and

feeling of the great majority of the stories.

Those are distinguished at times

by close observation of the natural

world and most often by embodying

a psychological and social world that

exists, if not exactly in our time, in

a sharply rendered and deceptively

modest vision.

Robert Murray Davis

University of Oklahoma