CLOVIS, interesting enough story completely ruined by unpleasant heterosexism

CLOVIS
JACK CLINTON
Harvard Square Editions (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3* of five

The Publisher Says: Trapped in the orbit of the buttes and a black obsidian Clovis, Hanna is sure there’s nothing romantic about her hot and dusty job as an archeologist in the cultural and real desert. As she negotiates the misogyny of this no-woman’s-land, she’s on the move to evade physical and spiritual abuse at the hands of oil-field boys, and guard the damaged and angelic Paul. She’s vegetarian in a fast food wasteland and a transcendentalist who can’t quite catch the wave of nothingness. Her clan of fellow archeologists tries to keep her from harm, but everything she truly needs lies outside the aegis of their reach.

Clinton’s novel explores the possible history of the Clovis people and their apocalyptic demise at the hands of their own elegant invention, the Clovis Point. The relevance of the eclipsed culture to the precarious balance of our own clouds the intense joys the characters feel as they navigate the wealth of the natural world.

Clovis casts an eye across the vast, empty lands of the Western American basins where the endless clamor of petroleum developments rings tirelessly. Told from the point of view of a working crew of archeological contractors who labor to save endangered artefacts from the churning machinations of the CanAm gas pipeline, Clovis bears witness to the quiet environmental usurpation of American public lands.

Clinton’s novel is an artful literary response to the unutterable and largely ignored decline of our collective natural wealth. Clinton mixes a sardonic misanthropy of our own current environmental course with jubilation, and the joy of love, the celebration of the human condition, and the intense passion of being immersed in the natural world.

Clovis will continue Harvard Square Editions’ tradition of promoting fiction that furthers civil and environmental causes in a market that would rather leave such voices unheard.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Say it with me, cishet men: Not all women want my dick, or any dick at all.

Complaining about people poiting out your heterosexist views is not on any more.

The rest of the story was interesting but honestly I had a really hard time getting it into my head because I was just so irritated by the male-fantasy/magic peen nonsense. Don't do this, men. It's not, and never will be again, 1975.