"Heading West" is the story of a young spinster librarian who is kidnapped from a picnic at Linville Falls, N.C., in much the same sense that Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is the story of a Southern family's vacation trip to Florida being interrupted by a gunman known as the Misfit. In fact, a character not unlike the Misfit interrupts Nancy Finch and her sister and brother-in-law just as they are beginning their ham sandwiches. The kidnapper then carries Nancy off with something like the Misfit's pointless malevolence, and she remains his hostage all the way to the Grand Canyon. Although the publisher promises the reader "suspense" and "terror" on the dust jacket and says the novel "winds to a fierce pitch"—probably assuming that readers no longer value, or perhaps notice, any but stupendously obvious emotions—the pleasures of "Heading West" are infinitely more subtle, complex and memorable than being scared in your armchair.

Certain recent novelists have been content to place fictive events within their cultural and historical context merely by providing a sound track, telling you what pop song is playing in the background of a scene. Ignorance of the recent recordings of, say, Blondie or Linda Ronstadt is enough to bar a reader from grasping all larger significance beyond plot in the works of such writers. Doris Betts … may or may not be familiar with Blondie, but without doubt she is deeply familiar with the Bible, Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner, Freud, Darwin, Konrad Lorenz, Navajo mythology and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. She is also capable of thinking and writing about more than one thing at once, and so, just as the horizontal progress of the Colorado River cuts vertically through stratum after stratum of rock in the canyon that is the central image of the novel, she tells a story that is taut and linear and compelling while simultaneously she cuts through layer after layer of different kinds of meaning.

The novel is divided into four parts. In the first, Nancy's problem is the same as a novelist's: how to persuade people that in the middle of a perfectly familiar scene, something extraordinary is happening. If suspense and terror were the point, Mrs. Betts could certainly have filled this section with tears, mad dashes and cries for help. Instead, she shows you a heroine who is wry, intelligent and sane, who wants to be free but for good reasons may not exactly want to go home. And Mrs. Betts makes you understand that what Nancy—or you—would really do at a coffee shop while in the custody of an armed man with faulty moral faculties is order your breakfast and eat it quietly. (pp. 12, 28)

In Part 2, farther west and into another stratum of meaning, images and associations switch from literary to biblical, from Robin Hood and Kafka to the prodigal son and thy brother's keeper. In Part 3, the characters actually enter the canyon, and as its rock wall shows striations formed before human life, so questions of blame and accountability are deftly interlarded with talk of wolves, eugenics, and the possibility that good and evil are simply traits carried in the cells, with no larger moral implications at all. And in Part 4, after Nancy has decisively ended her own victimization, the question of whether or not you can go home again emerges, as well as the possibility of transformation.

This last section is especially rich in echoes of the best of Southern literature. A character like William Faulkner's Benjy, awful relatives like those in Eudora Welty, and grotesque creatures akin to Flannery O'Connor's characters appear both as flesh and metaphor. Mrs. Betts can evoke them all, the wry, comic, familiar voices, without a quiver of lost timbre, and in addition to her marvelous ear there's her own droll vision.

"Heading West" is a book of great delights. (p. 28)