The Field of Vision
by Wright Morris
Summary
A handful of Nebraskans sit in the stands at a Mexican bullfight, and that is the entire present action of the novel: the bulls die in the sand while the book conducts its real business inside the spectators' heads, one field of vision at a time.
Walter McKee, solid Nebraska businessman, is there on holiday with his wife Lois, their small grandson, and Lois's father, old Tom Scanlon, who is nearly blind and deaf and lives almost wholly inside his memories of the frontier. By accident they have met Gordon Boyd, McKee's boyhood friend, the town's onetime golden risk taker, now a middle aged drifter trailing a German born psychoanalyst, Dr Lehmann, and Lehmann's strange, silent former patient, Paula Kahler.
Morris rotates the point of view chapter by chapter, and the past assembles in shards: Boyd tearing the pocket from Ty Cobb's uniform, a relic he has carried like a saint's bone; Boyd giving Lois, before she was McKee's wife, her first kiss; Boyd wading into a sandpit to walk on water, and nearly drowning; Boyd squirting soda pop in the face of the first bull and taking a bow to the laughing crowd, the failed transcendence that fixed all their lives. Each mind circles the same few events and sees a different story, which is the novel's whole argument: the past is not shared, only attended together, like a bullfight.
Around two hundred and fifty pages, spare and demanding.
Best for readers who like the modernist novel of consciousness applied to plain American materials, and are willing to do the assembly themselves.
Historical Context & Significance
The Field of Vision won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1957, high modernist technique carrying off the prize in a decade that mostly rewarded realism. Wright Morris was a double artist, an important photographer as well as a novelist, whose photo text books of Nebraska farmhouses and plains interiors are landmarks of their form, and the camera discipline shows in the fiction: objects, angles and frames carry the meaning his taciturn characters cannot say.
He worked the same home country as Cather, a generation on and stripped of romance, and produced over thirty books while remaining the writer a Washington Post reviewer once called the most honored and least read in America. The National Book Award found him twice: a quarter century after this one, Plains Song: For Female Voices took the 1981 award, an almost unmatched span between wins.
The Boyd and McKee material continued in Ceremony in Lone Tree, generally rated with this book at the centre of his achievement.