Books, Arts & Manners

Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn, by Evan S. Connell (North Point Press, 441 pp., $20)

Turning a novelist loose on Custer’s Last Stand isn’t a bad idea; and in fact Mr. Connell has cited Custer in the best known of his novels. In Mrs. Bridge (1959), that bilious account of the misery of middle-class existence in Kansas City, the character Grace Barron mentions “Custer’s deliberate violation of the treaty of 1868” in an outburst that anticipates her suicide. In Mr. Bridge (1969), another bilious account of the misery of middle-class existence in Kansas City, we find “a reproduction of Custer’s Last Stand” among a boy’s predictable possessions. So the novelist’s turning to a historical reconstruction of an American “myth” seems natural enough; but that novelist has brought with him, as he heads toward the Happy Hunting Grounds, all the ideological baggage of his fictions.

JT

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J. O. Tate

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Son of the Morning Star: Custer and the Little Bighorn, by Evan S. Connell (North Point Press, 441 pp., $20)

Turning a novelist loose on Custer’s Last Stand isn’t a bad idea; and in fact Mr. Connell has cited Custer in the best known of his novels. In Mrs. Bridge (1959), that bilious account of the misery of middle-class existence in Kansas City, the character Grace Barron mentions “Custer’s deliberate violation of the treaty of 1868” in an outburst that anticipates her suicide. In Mr. Bridge (1969), another bilious account of the misery of middle-class existence in Kansas City, we find “a reproduction of Custer’s Last Stand” among a boy’s predictable possessions. So the novelist’s turning to a historical reconstruction of an American “myth” seems natural enough; but that novelist has brought with him, as he heads toward the Happy Hunting Grounds, all the ideological baggage of his fictions.