NONFICTION - Oct. 25, 1992

BORN AGAIN AT THE LAUNDROMAT: And Other Visions of the New West by Dave Carty (Lyons and Burford, 31 W. 21 St. NY NY 10010: $18.95; 197 pp.). “This spring it happened again,” the author reports in one of these droll stories. “Several thousand courageous but stupid skunks died while crossing Montana highways. . . . Maybe someday they’ll learn. Maybe it won’t take a hundred thousand years. Maybe it will dawn on them, someday, that we don’t have to do this anymore. Maybe. But probably not.”

Although his symbolism is seldom blunt, in later analogizing the skunks to “ho-hum” factory workers, Montana writer Dave Carty makes it clear that we--the city-dwellers who are his intended audience--are the skunks. Surprisingly, though, we do not feel insulted by Carty’s dim view of our circumstances, for like the other urban-refugee writers of the West--from Jim Harrison and Hunter Thompson to Hob Broun and Tom Bodett--Carty has learned to affect a style that’s so humorously self-effacing--even, at times, self-loathing--that his pointed observations never seem to threaten.

Just as Horatio Alger stories were appropriate for an era when the frontier offered an outlet for limitless ambition, these drowsy, devil-may-care tales seem just right for an era when possibilities are circumscribed by political cynicism, national debt and the muddle between the sexes. Failure becomes chic, for instance, in a story about how Carty’s bowling team is “banned from all further competition for failing to give sufficient notice.” “Sufficient notice of what?” the author asks a teammate, who only rolls his eyes and mouths, in an Orson Welles baritone: “Banned for life.” Carty’s nonchalance is mostly a typically male defense against more intense emotions, but on a couple of occasions he gives us a glimpse behind the facade. A leisurely essay on how Carty’s car breaks down, for example, ends abruptly with a call from his sister, who says she is with his mother at the hospital, where his dad lies dead: “Worn out from a year of constant pain, his wasted heart and kidneys shot, he’s simply given up.” The last image is that of the author’s English setter puppy racing off, bound for the prairie.

Clearly Carty too is running away in these pages, and though our urban psychoanalysts (with the possible exception of John Marder Ross, reviewed above) will tell us he is foolish to do so, he gives the act the kind of nobility that makes us want to follow in stride.