[In the following excerpt, Baumann offers a positive appraisal of Dancing at the Edge of the World.]

Ursula K. Le Guin’s collection of essays, talks, and reviews, Dancing at the Edge of the World, takes us, both figuratively and physically, to another part of the world. Le Guin, a science-fiction novelist, lives in Oregon and considers California her spiritual home. Her writing exhibits a wonderfully open and unpretentious western American sensibility. She has an interest in this continent’s natural history and prehistoric past that is, in part, a family tradition. Her father was a noted anthropologist, and her mother, Theodora Kroeber, a novelist and the author of Ishi. Le Guin, now turning sixty, has written fifteen novels as well as poetry and children’s books. Her criticism in Dancing is sharp. She rejects, accurately I think, the “hollow sound,” the “Inside Club”-tone of C. S. Lewis. She is admiring and sympathetic, but unpersuaded by Doris Lessing’s science fiction. With mild reservations, Italo Calvino impresses her. These judgments carry weight.

Le Guin possesses impeccable feminist credentials. But she is a feminist with an eccentric regard for “housework.” Other traditional expressions of womanliness are also praised. A certain apocalyptic shading does creep in, however, and Le Guin is not above using terms like “psychopathic social system,” “masculinist,” or “machoman.” Her utopianism, with its airy brief for a noncoercive exercise of authority, is unconvincing. She can be cranky—one of her best qualities, actually—and her remarks on writing are occasionally marred by some cheap shots at Hemingway, Joyce, and others. Toward the academic priesthood and questions of literary theory, she is polite, informed, and unmoved. After all, this is a writer who has used Mom de Plume as a pseudonym.

But while she may wear her politics, both feminist and environmental, on her permissive sleeve, Le Guin is no propagandist. Many of the pieces in the book, a compilation of material stretching back to 1976, are much more than occasional remarks. “The Fisherman’s Daughter,” which touches on her mother’s writing as well as the general predicament of women writers, is polemical and invigorating. So is “A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be.” “The Space Crone,” an iconoclastic exploration of the meaning of menopause, is bold and allusive. Like [John] Updike, Le Guin makes room for the sacred.

Her commencement addresses at Bryn Mawr and Mills College are funny and smart and say many necessary things. “Instead of talking power,” she tells Mills’s graduates, “what if I talked like a woman right here in public. It won’t sound right. It’s going to sound terrible.”

At Bryn Mawr she elaborates on her theory of language. She calls the language of rational thought and objectivity the “father tongue.” It has its uses, she admits. But they are circumscribed. “Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective thought,” she cautions. Speaking of the most important things in life in the language of success and power is poisonous. “The language of the fathers, of Man Ascending, Man the Conqueror, Civilized Man, is not your native tongue. It isn’t anybody’s native tongue.” No, we first learn the mother tongue, the language of “women’s work; earthbound, housebound.” Le Guin, in her utopian passion, wants the dignity of that language restored. “The mother tongue, spoken or written, expects an answer. It is conversation, a word the root of which means ‘turning together.’”

Le Guin has a tongue sharp enough to illuminate such welcome and elemental realities as hearth and home. That mother tongue is spoken by Updike [in Self- Consciousness] and [Eva] Hoffman [in Lost in Translation] as well.