The Texas Revolution in Fiction
by Jeff Guinn
 Eight pages into Promised Lands, Elizabeth Crook's mesmerizing new novel about the Texas Revolution, a settler family has been massacred by a band of Yamparika Comanches.
It's a bloody massacre, too, with a child being skewered by an arrow, a nursing mother butchered and a man scalped alive. Gory details are plentiful in this initial scene, and plentiful throughout the next 500 pages.
As one critic noted of Promised Lands (Doubleday, $22.50), "the events are real and the descriptions are truthfully brutal and grotesque."
Because what else was Elizabeth Crook to do? On a recent Fort Worth visit, the 33-year-old Austin author said she had wanted this, her second novel, to be "a big, old-fashioned epic about love and war." Crook succeeded in splendid fashion -- Promised Lands may easily be one of the very best novels published in 1994 -- but the author's determination to be accurate in capturing the routine violence of 1835-36 Texas may never be properly appreciated in a publishing world that routinely consigns male and female novelists to separate reading markets.
"We haven't exactly known how to market this book," Crook said candidly. "I mean, it's about a war. That's the subject. But my photo [on the dust jacket] looks like I'm 18 years old. Men can get by with writing about serious subjects in this society even if they look or are very young. And like most young men writers these days, I've never been to war. So in researching, I had to fight very hard to make all my battle facts correct; I couldn't take some liberties with accuracy I think a man could take."
Accordingly, Promised Lands is grittily realistic. But you wouldn't know it by the dust cover, which is pretty with lots of pinks and purples and a swirly typeface, lacking only the depiction of a cleavage-flashing ingénue to mimic the art on the front of those ubiquitous ladies-market-only "bodice ripper" titles.
"I guess it's a little, uh, florid," Crook finally admitted, torn between loyalty to Doubleday, her publisher, and the sure knowledge most men browsing through the bookstores wouldn't glance twice at such pastel profusion. "I think people, when they look at this, would expect a romance, and it's a saga."
A fine sage, in fact, and exceptionally well-researched: Crook said she started her Texas Revolution homework for the project in 1986, and confounded Doubleday by writing her epic without the usual author's crutch of a plot outline.
"I knew who my characters were, two families, one Anglo and one Tejano, and whether each one would live or die," Crook recalled,." Doubleday wanted an outline, one that said what was going to happen in each chapter. I didn't want one. Writing that way is very liberating. There's nothing more boring than an outline. It's insecure, certainly -- like real life, you don't know what will happen when you get up in the morning. I like that kind of writing -- there's more feeling to it."
Crook experienced especially strong feelings when writing battle scenes.
"I don't enjoy violence," she said, "but it's easier for me to write violence than to read it or see it, because I have control of it. There's some comfort in that."
There's also an advantage here in Crook's being female, both for writer and reader: "I do think I brought something to these scenes a man couldn't have brought. I see battle differently than they do. Battles are very sad to me. Maybe men see them as glorious. I find them compelling, too, but in a gruesome kind of way."
Crook's initial book, The Raven's Bride, was a fictionalized account of the brief, troubled union of Texas Revolutionary hero Sam Houston and his young wife. Since Promised Lands is set in the same era, Crook says she knows she's in danger of being pigeonholed.
"I don't want to be seen as a regional author," Crook insisted. "That happens especially to writers from Texas. If somebody from New York writes a couple of novels about New York, nobody starts calling them 'New York writers,' but that happens to us in Texas. And once you're categorized, reviewers always look at your work in the context of that one genre. I want somebody to notice my writing, and that doesn't happen unless you write contemporary fiction."
So Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Crook's editor at Doubleday, can expect a different kind of Crook novel next time around?
"I have very definite intentions of writing contemporary fiction next time," Crook said. "I have my ideas and I'm working on them. I will not be categorized as a regional writer.
"Also, I'm tired of having to do so much research!" |
