Thanks to Faber and Faber and to NetGalley for offering me an ARC copy of this book, which I freely chose to review.

I read Barry’s Days Without End, loved it (you can read my review here) and couldn’t resist when I saw his next novel was available. This story follows on from the previous one, and it shares quite a few characteristics with that one. Although I’ve read some reviews by people who hadn’t read the previous novel and said that they felt this one could be read on its own, I wouldn’t dare to comment on that. Personally, because the story follows closely on from Days Without End, and it refers to many of the characters we had got to know there, I’d recommend readers thinking about taking up this series to start by reading the previous novel.

This story, like Barry’s previous book, is a historical novel, in this case set in Tennessee shortly after the American Civil War. In the previous novel we followed two characters, Thomas McNulty (the first person narrator) and John Cole, through their adventures as actors, Indian hunters and soldiers, and learned that they had adopted a young Lakota girl, Ojinjintka, renamed Winona; in this second book we hear the story from Winona’s point of view. The couple of men have settled down now, and the fact that this is not only a woman’s story, but the story of a Native-American woman, means that her ambit of action is much more restricted and despite her efforts to take control of her own life, she’s often at the mercy of laws and circumstances that consider her less than a human being. Although she is loved by her adoptive parents and the rest of the extended family she lives with, that is not a general state of affairs, and if life had treated her badly as a child, she also suffers a major traumatic event here, as a young woman. No matter that she is educated (she keeps the books for a lawyer in town), strong-willed, and determined. She is either invisible (just an Indian girl) or a creature to be abused, vilified, and made to take the blame for other’s crimes. That does not mean what happens to her does not reflect the events in the larger society (we do hear about racism, about lynching, about corruption of the law, about Southern resistance…), but we get to see them from an “other” point of view, and it creates a sense of estrangement, which I suspect is intended by the author. While Thomas and John were outsiders themselves and always lived in the fringes of society, Winona’s position is more precarious still.

I have mentioned some of the themes of the novel, and others, like family relationships, race, gender, identity (Winona remembers a lot about her life as a Lakota, and the memories of her mother in particular bring her much comfort and strength), and the lot of women also play an important part in the novel. There is also something of a mystery running through it, as there are a couple of crimes committed early on (one a severe beating of an ex-slave living with Winona’s family in the farm, and the other one her assault) and Winona spends much of the novel trying to clarify what happened and to get justice, one way or another, as the authorities are not going to intervene because neither of them are important enough. Although she turns into something of an amateur detective, this is no cozy mystery or a light adventure novel, and there are plenty of harrowing moments in it, so I wouldn’t recommend it to people who are looking for cheerful entertainment.

The characters are as fascinating as those from the previous novel, although we get to see them from a totally different point of view. It Thomas was the guiding consciousness of Days Without End, Winona’s voice (in the first person) narrates this fragment of the story. We get to see things from her perspective, and that also offers us an opportunity to reevaluate our opinion of the characters we already knew. We also meet some new characters, but because of Winona’s status (or lack of it), we are put in a difficult position, always feeling suspicious and expecting the worst from those we meet, because she has no rights, both because she is a woman and because she is an Indian woman. Her voice takes some time to get used to. She has been educated, but a bit like happened with Thomas in the previous novel, her speech and thoughts are a mixture of vernacular expressions and lyrical images. She is sometimes confused and can’t make sense of what is happening around her, and at others can show a great deal of insight. When she reports the dialogue and words of others —although she is quite an astute observer of others’ behaviour —, all the people she mentions talk pretty much the same, no matter how educated they are, and farm-hands and judges cannot be told apart from the way they speak. Although I felt for Winona at an intellectual level and was horrified by the things she had to go through, perhaps because of the estrangement I mentioned and of the style of the narrative, I didn’t find it as easy to connect at an emotional level. I liked her and I loved her insights and some of her comments, but I didn’t feel as close to her as I did to Thomas in the first book.

The writing is beautiful and poetic at times, while at others it can be difficult to understand due to the mental state of the character and to her peculiar style. It reminded me of the stream-of-consciousness narration typical of modernist writers in the early years of the XX century. Winona’s thoughts jump from one subject to the next, and although the story is told in chronological order, memories of her time with the Lakotas and flashbacks from her trauma keep interfering in the narrative. This is not a particularly fast novel or a page turner in the traditional sense, as it meanders along, with exciting and horrifying scenes intermixed with scenes of domesticity and everyday life. I confess to having to go back and forth at times to make sure I hadn’t missed anything, but it was worth it.

I highlighted many parts of the novel, but I’ll share a few samples (note that this is an ARC copy, so there might be some changes in the published version):

I wonder what does it mean when another people judge you to be worth so little you were only to be killed? How our pride in everything was crushed so small it disappeared until it was just specks of things floating away on the wind.

You can’t be a geyser of tears all your life.

‘She got to have some recompense in law,’ said Lige Magan. ‘An Indian ain’t a citizen and the law don’t apply in the same way,’ said the lawyer Briscoe.

Only a woman knows how to live I believe because a man is too hasty, too half-cocked, mostly. That half-cocked gun hurts at random. But in my men I found fierce womanliness living. What a forturne. What a great heap of proper riches.

I’ve seen some reviews who felt the ending was disappointing or unbelievable. I’d have to agree that there is something of the Deus ex machina about the ending, but overall I liked where the story ended and would like to know what happens next to Winona, to Peg (one of my favourite new characters), and to the rest of the characters.

Would I recommend the novel? It is a fascinating book, and one lovers of Barry will enjoy. I advise anybody interested in this historical period and eager to read this author’s work  to start with the previous novel, as I found the style of this one more challenging and more difficult to follow, and having an understanding of the background of the characters helps put it into perspective. As I usually do, I’d recommend readers to check a sample of the novel before deciding to purchase it, but give it a good chance, as it does take some time to get used to the style, and the story is well-worth reading and persevering with. I will definitely be looking forward to the next novel.

This is an interesting book, though as others have said, the last third is by far the best. Frazier, a white travel writer, befriends an Oglala Sioux man named Le from the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, and writes about his time hanging out with Le and his friends and family. He also writes more broadly about Native Americans today and about the last few centuries of history. The last third of the book is a biography of a basketball star named SuAnne Big Crow who was an inspiration for many before her tragic death as a teenager.

The content is interesting and Frazier’s writing is fine, but I do think he could have done more with the first two-thirds of the book. These chapters are often pretty diffuse, and he goes off on some weird tangents, like trying to hunt down every historically Native American bar in the country and chronicle their bar fights. Some of the broader information he provides is interesting, including some firsthand accounts of the American Indian Movement. But the first two-thirds was a bit of a drag overall.

I also wondered about the quality of Frazier’s information. At one point, in a brief discussion of eastern tribes, he mentions “the Lumbee of North Carolina, a tribe which has lived for a hundred years in the mountains around Lumberton unrecognized by anyone but themselves.” It’s cool that he mentioned the Lumbee, a group few Americans have heard of although they’re apparently the largest tribe east of the Mississippi, but basically everything in that sentence is wrong. Lumberton is nowhere near mountains – it’s in the flat coastal plain of eastern North Carolina – the Lumbee have been around for a lot longer than a hundred years, and the tribe gained state recognition in the 19th century, and a weird mostly-useless federal acknowledgment in 1956. (You can read more here or here). As always, when an author messes up the things you know, you have to wonder at the accuracy of the things you don’t.

All that said, SuAnne Big Crow’s story is really fantastic, and it’s worth reading the book for that part alone. Frazier is on much surer footing here with a narrative to follow and many people who knew SuAnne to contribute their memories, and I wish he’d spent more of the book on this type of writing and less on hanging out with Le.

At any rate, interesting book, and the author seems to be respectful and to view Native Americans as actual people rather than embodiments of stereotype, whether good or bad. He could have allocated his page count better, but it’s worth a read for those who are interested in the topic.

There There: A Novel

Tommy Orange

Hardcover: 304 pages

Publisher: Knopf; First Edition (June 5, 2018)

ISBN-10: 0525520376

ISBN-13: 978-0525520375

https://www.amazon.com/There-novel-Tommy-Orange/dp/0525520376

Reviewed by Dr. Wesley Britton

There There was a novel assigned to the members of a local book club I belong to. The book inspired a lot of discussion at our last meeting, and the responses ran the range.

I was among the members who really liked the book, but I easily understood the reactions of others with less positive feedback. Some were confused by the structure of the book as Orange has 12 characters telling their stories interwoven together, introducing us to one of the urbanized Native Americans living in Oakland, then the next, and so on, then back around the circle again. Other readers didn't like the book as it is rather dark and depressing in many sections. I have one friend who gave up reading the novel for that reason.

Much of the club's discussion didn't focus on the book itself, but rather the situations of identity in the modern Native Americans. Many of the characters not only wrestled with both pride and deep regret about the distant past when their cultures were devastated; some of the characters know very little about their heritage but still have strong opinions about it; and others know little about their personal bloodlines including any knowledge of who their birth parents are. All these threads are pulled together at a pow-wow in Oakland where all the book's characters congregate for a variety of reasons and mixed motives. 

The cast includes Jacquie Red Feather, an alcoholic with a tortured past who meets her daughter Blue, for the first time. In turn, we meet the trio of Jacquie's  grandsons like Orvil who adds a touch of magic realism to the story by continually pulling spider legs out of a wound on his own leg.

We also meet Danny who creates plastic guns on a 3D printer, one of the characters who infuses modern technology into a realm where most everyone has mixed feelings about their Native American past. Some characters plan on robbing the pow wow and come armed with Danny's guns as plastic can slip past metal detectors. But to describe the admittedly confusing pow wow falls into the realm of spoilers, so I won't say anything more about it.

Some readers in my book club didn't care for Orange's terse, spare writing style but I thought he was trying to allow many of his characters to speak in their own voices. yes, the book is dark and can be a downer, but that's offset, in my opinion, by the education we get into the circumstances of modern, urbanized Native Americans so far removed from their more agrarian forefathers and foremothers. Few of these stories are pretty; all of them seem all too real.

This review first appeared at BookPleasures.com on Sept. 25, 2019:

https://waa.ai/3bPq

Next time I’m tempted to wax poetic about how great fiction editing used to be, or to worry that a poorly conceived new release is evidence of the profession’s demise, I’ll remind myself of this book. This distinctively 80s mess of unrealized potential and terrible editing choices.

This is a family saga, beginning in Seattle with a biracial teenager, Rayona, whose mother, Christine, suddenly decides they are going back to Montana, to the reservation where Christine grew up. The first large chunk of the book is told from Rayona’s point-of-view, the second, slightly larger chunk from Christine’s, and then a small segment at the end comes from the family matriarch, Ida.

The first mistake is that it’s all told in the first person. It goes almost without saying that all three voices sound the same; first-time novelists love to do multiple narrators and they always turn out this way. But here this is more than a literary criticism; the voice is so jarringly wrong for both Rayona and Christine – who together narrate 80% of the book – that it distanced me from their characters. For fifteen-year-old Rayona – apparently a cautious, sensitive girl – it’s far too detached, ironic, world-weary, mature. And for Christine too – heedless, self-deluding, emotional – it’s too detached, too self-aware. Only for Ida, who really is a tough, bitter, independent, too-old-for-your-shit type, does it work. It took me quite awhile to realize that this disconnect between character and voice was what was throwing me out of their stories. But in the end I think I only got to know Rayona or Christine when not in their heads.

The second mistake is the pacing. At 372 pages, the book is on the longer side for realistic fiction, and it has enough plot for maybe half those pages. Mostly Dorris disguises the lack of forward momentum with – or perhaps loses it in – overly detailed but ultimately unimportant scenes. And the lack of focus, the unnecessary words and scenes, corrode the story both on a macro level and a scene-by-scene one. A five-page scene details Christine’s buying a membership in a video rental club. Meanwhile, Christine’s entire 153-page POV section contains only 10 pages at the end that don’t overlap with Rayona’s; overwhelmingly, this middle chunk is spent rehashing things we already know or could infer from Rayona’s section. And Rayona’s section, too, spends a lot of time developing her relationships with minor characters and settings which then never appear again. I seriously considered quitting the novel in the middle.

But here’s an example so that you can judge for yourself. In this scene, Christine is finally alone with her former nemesis – her brother’s best friend – just after the brother’s funeral:

“The waitress arrived to take our order, and I paid her my full attention. She must have been sixty-five, but all the same she gave Dayton the once-over while she waited for us to decide. Dayton had a Montanaburger with fries, and I had the meatloaf plate with a tossed salad on the side.

“What kind of dressing you want with that, hon?” She peered at me from above her black and rhinestone glasses frames.

“What do you have?”

“French, Thousand Island, Green Goddess, and Creamy Italian,” she recited.

“Italian,” I said, like a city girl who knew her way around.

“I need a à la carte Italian,” she called across the serving counter into the kitchen, and tacked the page with our orders on a metal wheel, though we were the only ones eating. The cook spun it to see what to fix.

Red and green holiday tinsel still lined the doors and a string of colored lights framed the mirror behind the bar. The waitress moved from table to empty table, sashaying her hips as she straightened the ketchup bottles. She had a high bouffant the color of washed-out lace, exactly like the angel hair that swirled beneath the artificial tree with gold ornaments that was balanced on a table at the end of the room. She was decorated too. Over her beige turtleneck she wore a black felt bolero with MERRY and CHRISTMAS written in green glitter on either side, and around her neck hung a pendant made from a Bic lighter in a gold lamé case. It swung like a charm between her low breasts.”

Look, I don’t care about this diner or waitress that we’ll never see again. I’m here for the interaction between Christine and Dayton – which winds up getting less page time than the exhaustive description of the restaurant and its menu.

The third mistake is the ending, and there too, Dorris’s writing is tripped up by lack of proportion – by which I mean, a failure to allocate the most space, and the most important space, to the parts of the story that are important, while compressing the minor details into smaller and less prominent segments. There isn’t really an ending here. Rayona’s and Christine’s sections end at seemingly random points, and then Ida’s section turns out to be entirely backstory, ending when Christine was an adolescent, and neither giving Ida’s viewpoint on the subsequent bitter conflict between the two women, nor providing any resolution in the present.

But there’s one aspect of the ending that was particularly curious to me: both Rayona’s and Ida’s sections end on a discussion of Christine’s adolescent religious disenchantment, which doesn’t seem to be important to Christine herself at all. At most, this episode supplies a simplistic answer to the question “why is Christine a party girl?”, which isn’t a question I expect to be at the forefront of any reader’s mind.

I wound up wondering if perhaps Dorris gave this episode such prominent billing because he intended the novel to be a critique of religion, or at least of Christian outsiders on reservations – but that doesn’t really fit the rest of the novel. The priests, while of questionable morality, are minor characters who act to facilitate decisions other people have already made, rather than driving the action themselves.

In the end, the frustration never paid off. There was potential in the characters and plot and settings, and that kept me reading. But ultimately, like the title itself, this book consists of too many words with too little meaning (the raft, while visited, is never particularly important). I wouldn’t recommend it.

This is an important book. The author compiles historical and archaeological research to provide a history of the Americas before (and shortly after) the arrival of Europeans. And it’s a legit history, in ways I didn’t realize were even lacking in my previous acquaintance with early American history before reading the book. Compared to most other parts of the world, we know relatively little about the early Americas, but there’s a lot more information available than is generally taught to the public, and so much of what we do know tends to be couched in these dismissive frameworks where native Americans are some sort of separate species of people, barbarians or noble savages or quasi-mythological beings, depending on your persuasion, all political structures consisting of “tribes” and their “chiefs” no matter how large the groups or sophisticated their political organization, everyone “living lightly on the land” and “in tune with nature” and so on. We know there were actual empires in Mexico and the Andes, and yet we reduce them to barbarians drinking out of skulls or performing human sacrifice (see: the worthless “documentaries,” always shot at night in red and black, that my teachers showed in middle school). We don’t stop to ask about all the trappings of civilization that empires tend to have, or that cultures tend to develop on their way to becoming empires: what sort of political and economic systems did they have? What kinds of technology and writing systems were developed? What about poetry and philosophy? Who were the leaders, innovators and thinkers, and what were their ideas?

Much of the achievement of this book, then, is writing a history of the Americas in the same way one writes a history of European or Asian cultures, and in fact, Mann uses numerous helpful comparisons between similar practices in different cultures, stripping away the mythology of native America that gets in the way of viewing people as people. It isn’t nearly as complete as histories about anywhere in Eurasia, and reading this book drives home the magnitude of how much history and culture has been lost, but there is a ton of information and detail here that I’d never encountered before. Some of Mann’s broad points no longer quite seem like “new revelations”: I think it’s fairly well-known among educated people at this point that the more hospitable parts of the Americas were heavily populated upon European arrival, then overwhelmingly reduced by disease. But other theses were still new to me: the extent of the land management carried out throughout North and South America, for instance, from regular burning of forests to maintain a particular ecological balance, to the Mayan engineering of potable water by paving over toxic elements in the Yucatan’s swamps with limestone, to the human-created fertile soil in the Amazon that now covers between a few thousand square miles and 10% of the basin, depending on whose estimates you believe.

So I found this to be a really fascinating, enlightening book, told in an engaging style, though I do have a few caveats. The book spends a lot of time on drama amongst scientists, which at first I found out of place, though by the end I realized the importance of including it: our learning about history is by no means finished, and readers who know how the sausage is made are perhaps better qualified to analyze scientific differences of opinion in the future. The book also jumps around a fair bit, organized by very broad topics and then returning to discuss the same cultures in different segments; it’s best read when you have time to engage with it and flip back to earlier sections to refresh your memory. The section on the Amazon seems less complete and persuasive than the others. And the author’s obvious desire to turn the information in this book into an ecological lesson, or some kind of rebuke to the environmental movement (hah! The Americas were never pristine after all!) seems forced and unhelpful: the fact that native Americans engaged in more active stewardship and cultivation than previously supposed doesn’t make the idea of destroying everything for temporary economic gain any better. But this is a small part of the book, perhaps tacked on because the author felt like he was supposed to impart a lesson.

Overall though, I think this is a fantastic book despite those few caveats, because it is so eye-opening, a great, accessible source of information that will probably be new to most of its readers, and because it represents a shift in popular thought about North and South American history. It is thorough, well-sourced and engaging, and I definitely recommend it.