On to Oregon

THE WAY WEST (340 pp.)--A. B. Guthrie Jr.--Sloane ($3.50).

Two years ago, at 46, Montana-born Novelist Guthrie, a veteran Kentucky newspaperman (Lexington Leader), proved in his first novel, The Big Sky, that an honest imagination edged with poetic understanding could rescue the trading and trapping mountain men of the West from the fake-heroic fictional mold into which they had long been cast. Now in The Way West, Guthrie has irrevocably separated the covered-wagon pioneers of the 1840s from the busy, lusty book jackets and movie posters which have long held them in box-office thrall. Guthrie's humane and literate feat will have the mass of paying witnesses it deserves: The Way West, is the Book-of-the-Month Club's October selection.

Testing Haul. This book, the second of a projected panel of four about the West, takes up where The Big Sky left off. Basically it is the familiar story of a wagon train moving west from Missouri to Oregon, but with differences that the jaded reader of historical fiction will be quick to appreciate. In all the body-torturing, spirit-testing haul from Independence to the Willamette, there is not one Indian attack, not a single war whoop or flaming arrow, not one hot-blooded, devil-may-care hero to turn in an impossible rescue, not even a big-breasted heartbreaker in low-cut linsey woolsey to take strong nation-makers from their plain wives and set them at each others' throats.

Like most winners of the West, Guthrie's Lije Evans would have been flabbergasted to learn that he was a hero. At 35, he was a big, easygoing Missouri farmer with a plain, heavy wife and an ordinary, gangling 16-year-old son, both of whom he loved. Like thousands of others, he had an itch to do better, to own a piece of the free and. fabulously fertile territory of Oregon, where a man could get a fresh start and his son could hope to do better than his old man. Evans captained the "On-to-Oregon" pilgrims with common sense, native guts and a powerful assist from ex-Mountain Man Dick Summers, surely the most credible scout in U.S. fiction.

Yipping Coyotes. Guthrie, who now teaches writing at the University of Kentucky, has researched The Way West with impressive care. The speech of the time, the day-by-day ordeal of the people, the description of the land as it then looked, the realistic handling of Indians, will make even the closest student of the U.S. West applaud.

He is still not master of the novel and his characters have a foursquare, surface rightness rather than depth. He can also use some unashamed, sugary, overripe prose: "And it came on toward night, and the sun was down and the fire of its setting dead, and the coyotes were beginning to yip on the hills and the stars to light up, and there was the good smell of aspen smoke in his nose." But most readers will be thankful for a fictional fidelity to time & place that is wholly exceptional among Guthrie's competitors.

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