Painter, swan, weaver: no sameness here

Literary Review, Fall, 2002 by Thomas E. Kennedy

News from the Volcano, Swan's sixth published volume of fiction, is her fourth story collection, comprising four short fictions and a lengthy novella, all set in the American Southwest where she grew up and to which she often returns in her work. The looming shapes of the New Mexico desert, "relics of ancient catastrophes," are natural symbols of these tales of good and evil, order and chaos, and the mockery of dust that answers human striving.

In the moody, lyrical title story which opens the book, menace lurks beneath the surface "like animals devouring each other." A stranger approaches like a shark in the trance of his own predatory knife--perhaps like Macbeth's "dagger of the mind," but here trying to get the protagonist, Lupe, to form the image of her own death. Yet the force of determination of the young Mexican girl is stronger than the knife; she cannot defeat evil but she can hold it from her.

In "Backtracking," the drifter Jason returns home reluctantly to claim his inheritance only to confront, buried in the town cemetery, the past which has driven and shaped him, putting into words "what had had no words then, what had seemed too powerful or too confused for human speech." In "The Chasm" we see again Swan's fascination with the cave and hole as a metaphor for the depth of the imagination--here a young boy imagining his brother's death in the rodeo.

The most substantial pieces of the collection are "Sloan's Daughter" and "Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn." The former's thirty-five pages span the scope of a novel, the life of four generations of a New Mexico family; it is a powerful study of order and chaos, about the illusions of permanence and human striving for mastery of existence. Again here the theme of the story rises from the southwestern landscape itself--deserts and mountains lifted and split, broken and arranged by the turmoil of the earth to shape the majestic scenery that capture the eye, the backdrop against which, here, men strut and cheat and seize the land by force or guile, only to lose it again to the dark, inexplicable, feminine powers that can not be tamed.

The collection concludes with "Gate of Ivory, Gate of Horn," a 120-page novella that seems something of a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Rachel, the child of East Coast Jewish parents who come west "to make a killing," finds herself lonely and with nowhere to turn, her only friend an aging East European woman, Henny, who shares the stories of her dreams with the girl. While Rachel's parents disappear from her in dreams of riches and fears of being cheated, Rachel begins to perceive the lessons of time and flux. Everything slips away and she cannot even imagine what to strive for, but the power that has been awakened in her by the older woman before she disappears from Rachel's life has clearly already begun to unfold. Her parents have tried in vain to make their fortune in clothing and in furniture, but Rachel has been shown a power to furnish and clothe the soul.