by James A. Michener
The author moved to Austin, Texas three years ago and settled in for 30 months to do his research for this 1,096-page book. It starts with Cabeza de Vaca and the other 16th-century Spanish explorers and winds up with a contemporary multimillionaire who is giving the state an art museum devoted to sports. In between, Michener seems to have crammed everything anyone ever told him about Texas: tales of Indian raids and rapes, famous revolutionary battles and hangings, hurricanes, tornadoes, oil strikes, football games, giant cockroaches, beautiful women, vicious Klansmen and ruthless speculators. The book is one great big incoherent mess. Historical names and events are mixed in with old-fashioned sentimental stories. The result is neither a good novel nor good history. Everything is given pretty much the same importance in the telling: An eight-foot rattlesnake lurking at the Brazos ferry gets about as much attention as the fall of the Alamo. As a device for holding the disparate information of the book together, Michener invents a governor's task force that is supposed to come up with a way to teach Texas patriotism to the state's children. In real life, in the 1930s, the Humble Oil company gave Texas schoolchildren a comic book that told the history of the state in vivid pen drawings and ballooned dialogue. It was unforgettable, not to mention a lot more concise than Michener's effort. To many Texans, indeed, this extravagant novel will be an embarrassment. My mother spent all 96 years of her life in Texas, and she loved the whole of it with clear-eyed devotion. She read three or four books a week and she would have read this one, of course. I can see the indignation and discomfort she would have displayed as she closed it, and I can hear her voice saying in disgust, "Well, that's just about the sappiest book I ever read." Amen, Mama. (Random House, $21.95)
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