Zane Grey. The Call of the Canyon. 1921; Black, 1952.

Many years ago we read Riders of the Purple Sage and thoroughly enjoyed it. On vacation, we came across an old copy of another Zane Grey book that had gone through a number of editions and decided to read it. It was fun to read, and like Riders, it was quite pointed.

The Call of the Canyon is set immediately after World War I. Many soldiers in that war, including a number of Americans, suffered from life-altering injuries, lingering effects of poison gas, and shell shock—now known as PTSD. Glenn Kilbourne was a young New Yorker and veteran of the war who was dealing with shell shock.

His fiancée from home remained faithful to him, and they continued to correspond, but when he returned with his PTSD, neither he nor his betrothed, Carley Burch, knew how to respond. While they did not break the engagement, Glenn thought it better if he go west to try to heal on his own. They continued to correspond, but as he wrote about life in the Arizona wilderness, they both realized that he had changed. He healed, but he also saw things a lot differently from what he did before the war as city boy.

Grey narrates the entire story from Carley’s point of view. She does try to understand the new Glenn and the American West, but wants to see things for herself. She is independently wealthy. She has an aunt who is the closest thing to a mentor and parent, and she has numerous friends, mostly socialites from the urban upper classes of the 1920s. There is indeed a Fitzgerald-style character to many of them, more The Beautiful and Damned than Gatsby. In other words, Carley and her set have already arrived.

Carley has to face a truly existential question. What is really important in life? She goes west by train and ends up in the canyon staying with a family that lives near Glenn. Glenn works for a sheep rancher and also raises hogs on his own. As he and Carley become reacquainted, he tells her how he recovered and how he discovered what is really important—work, family, and children.

Carley is what we would today call a first generation feminist. Of course, women now had the vote when the war ended, so they begin to see “liberation” as freer lifestyles, freer clothing styles, and freedom from housekeeping. In other words, it is something that the upper classes can live with, but which brings disorder to the lives of ordinary people, just as shell shock brought disorder to ordinary American men.

Among other things, Glenn asks what does it mean to be American? For him, the answer is not in New York City but in the West. The American government who recruited and drafted all the soldiers and sailors in the war did very little to help them after the war. For the most part they were on their own. Grey highlights the stories of a few other war veterans including a friend of Glenn’s whom Carley meets in a New York hospital and a sailor who marries one of Carley’s friends.

While this has elements of a Western—typical Zane Grey—and even elements of a romance—there is another woman in the story—at its heart The Call of the Canyon is a social satire. It takes on a very different sensibility from Fitzgerald or Hemingway, but it is as much a part of the literary period as those two writers.

Grey also is quite literate here. Carley and Glenn are both well educated. We see allusions to the Bible, Shakespeare, and various other writers and poets just as we would in other novels from the jazz age. The end may be a tad tidier than others from the period, but Grey is making a strong point. There are still many Carleys and her ilk today. And not a few Glenns. What does it really mean to be a man or a woman? Or an American? How can we make peace with ourselves and with the natural world?