Iris Steele has had a rough life. In the first sentence of Joyce Weatherford’s semiautobiographical Heart of the Beast (Scribner, 2001), we learn that Iris’s mother is dying of brain cancer. A few pages later, Iris is speaking of her father and brother in the past tense. By the end of Part One, the Nez Perce tribe is suing her for the Oregon ranchland that’s been in the family more than a century. At her mother’s wake, neighbors line up to inquire about the availability of land and farming equipment.
Iris, 28, refuses to let life’s obstacles defeat her, but fortunately Weatherford, ’85, doesn’t hand us Scarlett O’Hara in Wranglers swearing she’ll never give up her ancestral home. (Iris is quite aware that it was the Nez Perces’ ancestral home first.) She’s crabby, she’s exhausted, she’s terrified and she certainly doesn’t want Indians taking away her land. She waited too long to seed her wheat fields because she was taking her mother to the mineral baths; and after the wake, she has to cope with a schizophrenic aunt who has come home after decades in an institution to finish making bronze busts of everyone in the family.
Heart of the Beast is bleak and depressing, with flashbacks to Iris and her brother being verbally and sometimes physically abused by their parents. The story flows smoothly through these chronological shifts, deftly veiling the climactic events of 10 years earlier until it’s time to reveal them.
This is Weatherford’s first novel, and at the start her prose is overwrought. But as the story proceeds, there are stark insights. “The truth was my parents survived together as long as they each had an enemy. My father’s was his son. My mother’s was her daughter.”
Weatherford’s tough realism is uncomfortably authentic at times, as when she describes the inner workings of a combine, rattles off lists of tractors, or tells of “working the cattle” (whereby cows are dehorned and male calves castrated and their testicles fed to the dogs). Still, her vivid descriptions give a clear glimpse into an insular world, and her frank, politically incorrect take on the Nez Perce lawsuit makes compelling reading. The drama of Iris’s story subtly and slowly, but irresistibly, draws the reader in.
Chaney Rankin, ’00, is a graduate student at Georgetown University.
