Timothy P. Schilling. (Summer reading).

My love of the West came early. I lived my first years two hours southeast of Chicago, in Indiana. One of my favorite childhood memories is of a car trip westward with family and friends through the Badlands of South Dakota to Yellowstone and the red rocks of Colorado. I was impressed by the dryness, the openness, and the mountains that broke from the plains. That feeling of affinity that I discovered as a boy has never left me.

The sad irony of my life is that I now live farther east than ever, in the Netherlands. Luckily I have a large collection of books that mentally place me in the West. For those of you who can get yourselves westward this summer, do. For those who can't accomplish this physically, I recommend the following books to help you do it mentally.

When it comes to writing perceptively about the American West, few can match the contributions of Wallace Stegner. His gift was to see the complex interweaving of Western social life, which he understood in political and moral terms, and to convey his findings in stories vivid with personal detail. His novel Angle of Repose is perhaps the best-known example of this, but other, less well-known works prove just as rewarding. One is Marking the Sparrow's Fall: The Making of the American West (Henry Holt & Company, $14, 359 pp.). This volume, posthumously published, provides an overview of several of Stegner's main themes: that the West is really many, geographically distinct, Wests, which deserve to be historically known; that the West is as much the product of communitarian effort as it is of rugged individualism; and that we are called to take up our responsibility for one another and for the land. "Can any of the values left over from the frontier speak persuasively to the nation we have become?" Stegner asks. "Some of the most antisocial of them still do, especially the go-getterism of an earlier phase of capitalism." Yet Stegner finds hope in the fact that, if the American "is still an individualist, he is also a belonger" and "he has not given up the future."

Stegner's All the Little Live Things (Viking Penguin, $13.95, 352 pp.) is another work that demonstrates his ability to illuminate political and moral themes that inform life in the West. In this novel, the protagonist, Joe Allston, is a retired literary agent who has settled down with his wife on a paradisiacal property in California. Enjoyment of his golden years is forestalled by the encroachments of his neighbors: Jim Peck, a hippie who is camping on his land; Tom Weld, who is developing the land adjacent to Allston's; and Marian Catlin, an attractive young woman who is dying of cancer. Allston has nothing but disdain for Peck and Weld, while he is constantly challenged by Catlin to be more loving and tolerant. The plot follows Allston's interactions with his neighbors and his attempts to be true to his own values. This book is full of little treats, like Allston's cringing self-examination when a neighbor catches him making fun of her art. I took great pleasure in revisiting the 1960s, here from the perspective of my grandparents. I grew up presuming the superiority of the ideals of the left. What I couldn't see then, but do see now (in some small part thanks to Stegner), is that the self-certainty of twenty-year-old hippies must have been, at times, insufferable to an older generation that had spent its life building the institutions the hippies were trying to tear down.

Apart from Stegner, there are countless other authors who could take one West this summer. The names Willa Cather, Mark Twain, and Ivan Doig come to mind. Rather than discuss any one of these authors, I suggest a look at the Western genre of novels and films as a whole. Jane Tompkins's West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (Oxford, out of print) explores the Western genre, which has been instrumental in shaping our understanding of the West. Tompkins argues that Westerns embody a rejection of the feminized, domesticated Christianity expressed in nineteenth-century social activism and in writings by Charles Sheldon, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, and Maria Cummins. In the Western genre, men reclaimed their manhood by envisioning themselves in a hard world where only a man's own physical deeds--not polite talk and institutions--count. Westerns make no room for the Christian "drama" of ordinary events, with its concern for soul searching and its focus on the daily responsibilities that accompany a career, family life, and civic involvement. "When Christianity is no longer the frame of reference," Tompkins writes, "manhood can risk itself only through risking death." This is an interesting juxtaposition, but Tompkins overstates her case here. Where she sees a "major shift in cultural orientation" in the genre, I see a new chapter in an ancient contrast in life perspectives. Isn't the Odyssey, for example, also a work in which the drama of daily life is overlooked in favor of a death-risking wandering? Tompkins could have broadened her frame of reference to advantage here.

This is quibbling though, because she aims to be thought-provoking and repeatedly is. See, for example, her description of how the cowboy's silence manipulatively preserves his power. "For a man to speak of his inner feeling not only admits parity with the person he is talking to, but it jeopardizes his status as a potent being, for talk dissipates presence, takes away the mystery of the ineffable self which silence preserves. Silence establishes dominance at the same time as it protects the silent one from inspection and possible criticism by offering nothing for the interlocutor to grab hold of." That's some pretty good talking about not talking, pardner.

Timothy P. Schilling lives in Holland and has learned many un-Christian life lessons from Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.