Happy Birthday, America

By LANCE MORROW

CENTENNIAL

by JAMES A. MICHENER

909 pages. Random House. $10.95.

Whatever else James Michener may be guilty of, no one has ever accused him of thinking small. Practically entire forests have been felled to produce such trunk-sized novels as Hawaii and The Source. In Centennial, Michener begins with the first faint primordial stirrings on the face of the deep and slogs onward through the ages until he hits the day before yesterday. He is the Will Durant of novelists, less an artist than a kind of historical compacter.

"The purpose of a writer like me," Michener explains in a separately printed booklet about Centennial, "is to create a universe." The reader is warned. "Three billion, six hundred million years ago," Michener begins, "the crust had formed, and the cooling earth lay exposed to the developing atmosphere." The next 110 pages are taken up with discourses on magma and glaciers, the planet's prehistoric upheavals. Then come the prehistoric beasts, which the author vaguely anthropomorphizes: a lovely Diplodocus wandering in the muck "toward dusk on a spring evening one hundred and thirty-six million years ago" finds herself growing "irritable."

Centennial is intended as Michener's 200th-birthday present to the U.S. His setting is a small, fictional town, first called Zendt's Farm, then Centennial, on the eastern slope of the Rockies along the South Platte River in Colorado. His aim is to use the territory around the South Platte as a means of describing nothing less than the evolution of the American West. When he has disposed of prehistory, Michener introduces his first human character, an Arapaho warrior named Lame Beaver, born in 1747. By the time the book arrives at 1972--with doleful references to Watergate and the ecological crisis--Michener has some 70-odd more chief human characters, along with hundreds of bit players. They include all the tribes of the West, Homerically described: the French trappers who first penetrated the wilderness, mountain men, cattlemen, sheepherders, cutthroats, railroad folk, beet tycoons, actors, industrialists, politicians and, finally, ecologists.

Except for the prehistory, Michener paces his narrative well. He organizes the book as a series of interconnected novellas, focusing each on one or two central characters. The tale of the shrewd French trapper Pasquinel and his Scottish partner McKeag becomes a roving chronicle of the West from St. Louis to the Rockies in the early fur-trading days. In a later set piece, Michener brings pageantry to the ancient cliche of the cattle drovers beset by thirst and outlaws on the long trail from Jacks-borough, Texas, to the South Platte.

Civic Conscience. Michener's manifest love of the land he writes about can be moving. The almost hubristic sweep of his conception is impressive. He has a busy curiosity about family dynasties and bloodlines. He writes especially well about the technique of things: how Indians chipped their arrowheads, what breeds of grass and cattle best survived in the inhospitable prairie. He is also one of the few modern novelists who order their works with a sense of civic conscience, here notably in his discussion of Indians and of the depredations of commerce. A Book-of-the-Month Club selection and already a bestseller before official publication, Centennial is indeed a monumental birthday present and in its way, a generously entertaining one. As an epic vision of America, however, it may suffer from a familiar Michener mistake--erring on the side of the grandiose. . Lance Morrow

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