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Gods in Granite: The Art of the White Mountains of New Hampshire. By Robert L. McGrath. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. 2001. Pp. xxviii, 216. $49.95.)
Gods in Granite is a critical analysis of the origins and the multifarious meanings of artistic images of New Hampshire's famed mountains and valleys. Since it is Robert McGrath's expressed purpose to go beneath and beyond the standard evocation of purple mountain majesties, the book makes a witty beginning with a frontispiece showing an anonymous artist sketching in a cloud of blackflies. The time is early summer, the place the White Mountains. Swaddled in layers of protective clothing topped by a veil and a smoldering pipe, the recorder of Nature's beauties hunches over his drawing pad while the insects probe for an unguarded spot. Such candid glimpses of the artist's way of life turn out to be few and far between. The author's focus is on the ways in which painters, printmakers, magazine illustrators, photographers, and poets seized upon the landscape "as a locus of cultural possibility...." Their endeavor was "to historicize, sacralize, pastoralize, and, ultimately, to aestheticize" a stony, unforgiving landscape. From Charles Codman's grimly brooding view of Crawford Notch after the fatal avalanche, to Suzanne Pretty's indictment of excavation and logging activities, to Robert Jordan's "sensuously evocative" Trail to Champney Falls, which provides the coda to the book, they proceeded to distill a complex of aspirations and warnings for Americans.
The foregoing quotations fairly sum up McGrath's argument. They also suggest the author's preference for polysyllabic words like "depotentiating," "confected equilibrium," "confected formulaic composition," and "epiphanic emblem." While such terms serve his purpose-- that is, persuading us that pictures are a lot more complicated than they appear on the surface-they sometimes...