Doakies

By R.Z. Sheppard

LEAVING THE LAND

by Douglas Unger

Harper & Row; 277pages; $13.95

The loads would be as displaced in Douglas Unger's first novel as they were in The Grapes of Wrath, though Ma, Pa and Tom might not understand how it was possible to become outcasts of national prosperity. For generations, the land around Unger's Nowell, S. Dak., has produced an abundance of wheat and corn. During World War II, a need for a fast, cheap protein spurs the Government to subsidize an increase in turkey raising. The larger output can easily be handled at the local processing plant, owned by Safe-buy, an early entrant in agribusiness. Eventually overproduction and falling demand leave farmers with too many birds and no money to pay back bank loans. Safebuy can then pursue "vertical integration," headquarters jargon for buying distressed land cheap and getting the former owners to work it for wages. Ironically, the capitalists soon discover themselves in the same fix as Communists who nationalized agriculture: yields drop because farmers will not put in 18-hour days on someone else's acreage. The company is left to confront its "farm unit management problems," and Nowell sinks deeper into the macroeconomic dust bowl.

Unger converts this Wall Street fod der into an affecting family story, mercifully short on saga but long on authenticity and the instinctual relationship between people and their land. A lot of true grit sifts through his pages. A farmer leads his sons as if growing things were a war on nature: "Their machines moved out over the fields, the mower clattering, breaking down at least twice a day. The old man stomped and swore. He nicked his hands replacing sharp steel teeth. The hayrakes followed his mower, his sons turning the dried hay into neat, continuous piles that looked like whorls of a huge thumbprint." A mother lays down the facts of life as immutable laws: "There's a lot more to life than the kind of love you mean. . . There's children and dogs and a garden to water. There's having a house and all the things that go with it, and all the work to keep that house a place where people want to come to your door, that's what there is."

The author, 31, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, breaks no stylistic ground. He blocks out his novel in two broad sections. The first is the third-person narrative of Marge Hogan, farm daughter whose two older brothers are killed in World War II. She spends her working hours in a sea of white feathers and turkey droppings, and her free time at the Cove Cafe, where a desperate young woman might select the best from a bad lot of rude and scruffy locals.

Marge breaks ranks by marrying James Vogel, newcomer and lawyer for Safebuy, but the traditions of paper pushing and sodbusting soon conflict. The marriage dissolves. Marge must work the gambling wheel at the Elks' club to raise her son Kurt and to keep the fallow farm where her widowed mother bitterly awaits death. Part II is Kurt's account of Mother Marge's struggles, her drinking and her unhousebroken boyfriends, including a Sioux sheep rancher. The novel concludes with a hint of contrivance as the title, Leaving the Land, takes on a resonant double meaning: the inevitability of departures and the promise of continuity.

Unger obviously writes about what he knows: the coarse prairie soil called gumbo, the papery texture of clapboard in the last stages of dry rot, the astonishing stupidity of turkeys: "At first, they pecked cautiously at the droplets as if they were insects. Then after the slow realization that it was water . . . that entire flock in an incredibly orchestrated movement raised their scraggly necks from the ground, tilted their bald red heads to face the sky, and opened their beaks wide to the falling rain until they drowned."

Unger also understands what writers like Eudora Welty have learned, that the trick is to write what you don't know about what you know. He intuits a generous range of emotions and draws stark credibility from the stoppled rage of defeated men and lonely women. Despite scenes of barnyard naturalism, his book is not simplistic. Safebuy plays rough but is no facile symbol for evil. Hardworking farmers lose the most, but sympathy is strained when they conduct "funeral auctions," a feeble euphemism for looting the property of newly buried neighbors. Yet scavengers cannot remove the land, which Unger's promising debut conveys as both real estate and dreams. --By R.Z. Sheppard