Austin American-Statesman from Austin, Texas • 57

Sunday; Octobers, 1S97 Austin American-Statesman Rick Bragg is a mama's boy Repaying the open road Photo book detours around cliches for fresh look at the view from America's asphalt trails j.ni.fl if Vv- i I Oliver Stone The Love Song of I Oliver Stone I Filmmaker's youthful confessions more revealing than readable -a z-''y i I a nmj.v: ii nil nun I 'Highway: America's Endless Dream' Photographs by Jeff Brouws (with essays by Bemd Polster and Phil Patton) -Stewart, Tabori Chang, $29.95 By Hank Stuever American-Statesman Staff ighways are the guest stars of movies, the metaphorical stand-ins for journey, with backlit din ners surrounded by sage plants shot against countless Western skies. Route 66 with its motels and curio shops falling victim to the big, bad interstate bypass is perhaps our most recognizably unrecognizable monument, heavily photographed and over-intellectualized. Among the most fervent chroniclers have been foreign photographers and filmmakers, who manage to put their fingers right on the lessons that the American roadstyle teaches about the American lifestyle: Get on here, and keep going. But who couldn't follow this map by now? Our pre- and post-war roadside so completely reaches across our visual consciousness that it has now spread to the cliche. It is a surprise, then, to come across so much new stuff to ponder in "Highway: America's Endless Dream," a stunning and well-edited effort by Jeff Brouws, a photographer from California.

His pictures reinvigorate old notions along the open road, particularly the West, slightly turning down the knob on automotive romance so that a true and more journalistic portrayal comes through. People don't think about their cars and motels nearly as much as artists do, and.Brouws seems aware of that. "Abandoned Motel Room, Shamrock, Texas, 1993," presents itself early on, a creepy and hollow place of crumbling ceilings and dirty mattresses. Bleakness and decay inform us as much as the neon and flash of postcards; "Cash for Cars," "Jesus Saves" and "Palmist" are some of the night signs that both beckon and haunt the reader. Opposite Brouws' spookily streetlight-green picture of a diner on "Main Street, Battle Mountain, Nevada, 1993," the filmmaker Wim Wen-ders is quoted saying: "In the West there are many advertising signs half-eaten away by the elements, already falling apart.

For filming, I Abandoned Motel Room, Shamrock, Texas, From 'Highway: Amenca's Endless Dream' 1993, by Jeff Brouws. j. IZ vJ From 'H'ghway. Amenca's Endless Dream' Seven Lunch Customers in a Hamburger Booth, Harlingen, Texas, by Russell Lee, U.S. Farm Security Administration collection, 1936-1943.

nd proud of it With the 100th anniversary of William Faulkner's birth just past, Austin awaits a visit from two of the new generation of-Southern writers. Reading together at Book People at 7 p.m. Monday will be best-selling North Carolina fiction writer Charles Frazier and Alabama journalist and memoirist Rick Bragg Over But the Shoutin' I talked with Bragg by phone last week from an earlier stop on the book tour and asked the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter how he felt about being billed as a Southern writer. "If you talk like me, what else are Morris they gonna he drawls. When Bragg gives readings from 'All Over But the Shoutin'," he gets the same response whether it's Mobile, or Akron, Ohio.

"Time and again, people come up to me and say: 'I grew up like you Dirt poor, but with a mama or a daddy who made it possible to succeed. Bragg's book, which is a tribute to his mama, tells a heartwarming, true story, and he writes well enough to keep it from seeming sappy which it could. He's a fine storyteller, one inheritance from his Southern family. "My Aunt Gracie Juanitawasoneof the he says. "Her timing was beautiful.

I grew up with some of the best damn storytellers in the world. "My mama gave up everything. She sacrificed; she stopped living for us," he says. "I think most mamas are like that," he adds, not joking. "It's not a unique story" Neither, he says, is it this year's "Angela's Ashes," as some critics have suggested.

"It's not the same story. He (Frank McCourt) waited to write his book. I wrote mine because my mama was still alive. It's a tribute to her." She's 61, and with the profits from this book, her 38-year-old son has bought her a house on an acre and a third of land that she has now planted all in flowers. "I say in the book that you can't fix everything with a damn house," Bragg says.

"In a way, she never will be at peace." Bragg's next book will be a true Southern novel full of drooping magnolias, gothic terror and crime, and good guys who win and bad guys who lose. Though that's not the kind of book he usually reads. He's a fan of Eudora Welty Robert Penn Warren, Willie Morris, Pat Conroy Bragg has just read "Cold Mountain," the historical novel by the author he's coincidentally paired with on this visit, and he pronounces it an outstanding book, as others have before him, but "very sad." His own story has a happy ending, but only sort of. "The truth is pretty ambiguous," he says. "There's not a lot of victory in it." Coming: Journalists Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel will be in town Monday talking to UT classes about their book "Bombshell: The Secret Story of America's Unknown Atomic Spy Conspiracy" It's the story of the American physicist at Los Alamos' who gave the plans for the atomic bomb to the Soviets.

'I Breakthrough: Austin literary agent Jim Hornfischer called with the news that his client, Texas professor W.W. Brand, is already having success with his upcoming 900-page book, "Teddy Roosevelt: The Last Romantic" (Basic Books, pecember). It's been named a main selection of the Book of the Month Club and the History Book Club. Brand, who lives in Austin, is also the author of "The Reckless Decade." Apply Now: Audrey Slate, director of the Dobie-Paisano project, just put out the call for applications for next year's writing fellowships. Winners get to live on the late J.

Frank Dobie's 254-acre ranch west of Austin for six months, and receive a $7,200 stipend. It's open to native Texans, those who have lived in Texas at least two years or those whose published writing has a Texas subject. For information, write: Dobie-Paisano Project, J. Frank Dobie House, 702 E. Dean Keeton Austin, TX 78705.

Entry deadline is Jan. 23, 1998. This column, which appears each Sunday, is compiled from staff and wire sources. Send items to Anne Morris, Austin American-Statesman, RO. Box 670, Austin 78767.

7 Anne 1 often chose locations that I knew would soon disappear." 1 Brouws takes us to and fro, from East to Midwest and West (including the Texas Panhandle, which is Texas enough, in terms of the big road), divvying up his work in chapters titled "Lanes," "Signs," "Main Street" and latest covers political in down-home style Both sides of the Highway 'A Child's Night Dream' By OIiverStone St. Martin's Press, $21.95 By Jody Seaborn American-Statesman Staff Before he became one of the most controversial and provocative filmmakers of his generation, Oliver Stone aspired to" be a novelist and, at the age of 19, wrote a confessional work he Child's Night Dream." -i An ambitious novel that layst Stone's young psyche bare, "A Child's Night Dream'! was rejected by al publishers when Stone shopped it around in 1967. Dejected, he "threw several sections of the manuscript into the East River," as he writes in the book's prologue, and volunteered for Vietnam, where he served in a combat infantry unit for 15 months. Recently reconstructed with the help of editor Robert Weil, who is also Henry Roth's editor, t'A Child's! Night Dream" is a curious work by the privileged, well-read son of a WallJ Street investor and French-born so- cialite mother. It is a bold though ultimately not a good book.

The book has its moments, to be sure. Two, long chapters, especially, are worth mentioning: "Death Comes 1 in the Afternoon" anticipates Stone's Academy Award-winning film "Pla- "The Boilers of the Moon" is a well-written sea tale that with a bit more development would have made a very good novella. As might be guessed from the chap-jj ter title "Death Comes in the After-3! noon," there are echoes in "A Child's Night Dream" of Hemingway Actu-; ally, the Hemingway references are 32 mercifully few. More harmful are the frequent echoes of Joyce and Eliot, the usual suspects in many a case of sophomoric angst. I "A Child's Night Dream" features as its main character an alienated young man named William Oliver Stone.

Poor Oliver, at such a tender age he has already measured too many of his'J days with the boring conversations of the hip star-and-model-filled parties his mother forces him to attend. He yearns for adventure, for war, for any-: thing t6 escape Yale and, presumably, another reading of "The Love Song of-J. Alfred Prufrock." To spit out the butt-ends of his days and ways, Oliver joins the Army. He survives Vietnam barely and makes his way back to America -aboard a merchant ship. Rather than return home, he travels to Mexico, where he writes a novel that he mostly destroys.

Oh, and he also ex- presses certain Oedipal desires for hismother. Stone uses stream-of-cbnsciousness for most of "A Child's Night Dream," i and the book's Molly Bloom-like final chapter achieves a certain amount of irony. But stream-of-consciousness works only in the hands of the surest a of writers; in the hands of a cocksure one hellbent on self-revelation, it is nothing but a recipe for tedious self- indulgence. 'A Child's Night Dream" contains hints of the talented screenwriter and director to come, as cinematic moments pop up from time to time. That Stone rejected novels after this failure is perhaps our loss.

That he re-collected himself and discovered filmmaking is our gain. In the end, then, "A Child's Night Dream" stands as a curiosity as a por- trait of an artist in search of a medi- um. 1 Reviewer Seaborn is an American-Statesman arts and entertainment editor. i "Passers-by." The final group, "Ruins," is perhaps most evocative of our vanishing motoring heyday, previewing an emerging and more overt wasteland. This is followed by almost celebratory portraits of today's freeway on-ramps.

Perhaps in 50 years, Brouws can find meaning in abandoned outlet malls. What makes "Highways" complete are essays from Bernd Polster and Phil Patton, chronicling the history of the open road, and its presence in literature and film both classic and recently classic books and films are listed at the end. Without becoming a textbook, "Highways" is a tempting primer of that endless row of white lines, and the people waiting beyond its exits. It is also a treat for the long-mesmerized expert who has driven here before. Get on, and keep going.

Reviewer Stuever is an American-Statesman features writer. spectrum Viewing Washington, Hightower skewers President Clinton as" "thixotropic," or suffering from a pathetic condition typical of substances such as mayonnaise and ketchup that liquefy when a little heat is applied. Newt Gingrich's elevation to House speaker reminds the author that the higher a monkey climbs, the more you see of his ugly side. While tackling complex topics, the essays remain firmly plainspoken, and are illustrated by a solitary plain-vanilla income-distribution graph presented with an apology for such near-wonkishness. Five chapter headings subdivide the whole: Corpo-rateworld! They Get the Goldmine, We Get the Shaft; Class War Let's Check the Doug Jones Average; The Media Like Cats Watching the Wrong Mousehole; Pollution "Status Quo" is Latin for "The Mess We're and Politics You Don't Have to Be in Who's Who to Know What's What.

Hightower lards the material with anecdotes and quotable quotes. Dotting the "economics and environment made easy" lessons are bits and pieces of the author's own life story: attending North Texas State Univer- IY any, wuiivuig aa a vvdaimigiuii jxyi- tol aide, editing the Texas Observer, touring the state's small towns while running unsuccessfully for the Texas Railroad Commission, bucking the chemical lobby during two terms as Texas agri-. culture commissioner and finding a new career as host of a political talk show See Hightower, D7 r' 7 I ff'h i I Hightower's 'There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road Except Yellow Lines and Dead Armadillos' By Jim Hightower HarperCollins, $23 By Mary Alice Davis American-Statesman Staff If you're fired up by the straight-talking populist style of Austin writer and broadcaster Jim High-tower, you'll find his new book a treat. If his brand of anti-establishment politics rubs like grit in your Guccis, the book is unlikely to cause conversion. But if you're just middle-of-the-road undecided, "There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road Except Yellow Lines and Dead Armadillos" might knock you off the stripe.

Hightower wraps up a lot of wit and information about how the modern world works in a strong, entertaining package. His opening shot is attributed to old cowboy wisdom: "Speak the truth, but ride a fast horse." Hightower argues that the average working person is more likely to be all over the political road than in the middle of it. "Most of us are mav ericks, political mutts each one of us a heady and sometimes hot mix of liberalisms, conservatisms and (watch out now!) radicalisms." Which leads to an anecdote about his father, the" late William Hightower, to whom the bonk j.s dedicated. "High" was Jim Thursday Hightower will sign copies of his book at 7 p. at Book People.

a magazine distributor and Lions Club and Little League loyalist in Denison. Listening to Daddy and his buddies around the Dr Pepper cooler, young Hightower devel-( oped a deep suspicion of the "power elite," be it the "downtown crowd" in Denison or the Beltwav hunch in D.C..