Acts of Recovery: The American Indian Novel in the ’80s

Abstract

Essay Reviews ACTS OF RECOVERY: THE AMERICAN INDIAN NOVEL IN THE 80s Review of The Beet Queen. By Louise Erdrich (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1986. 338 pages, $16.95) / Fools Crow. By James Welch (New York: Viking Press, 1986, 316 pages, $18.95) / A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. By Michael Dorris (New York: Holt and Company, 1987. 343 pages, $16.95.) The American Indian novel—the novel written by an American Indian —has a rather rich history, dating back to Simon Pokagon’s Queen of the Woods in 1899, or, perhaps, as far back as John Rollin Ridge’s heavily fic­ tionalized biography, Joaquin Murieta in 1854. For the most part, however, novels by Indian writers—Pokagon, John Milton Oskison, John Joseph Mathews, D’Arcy McNickle, Mourning Dove—have been overshadowed by romantic novels about Indians by such non-Indian authors as Oliver LaFarge, and Hal Borland. Since N. Scott Momaday’s Pulitzer-winning House Made of Dawn in 1969, all of that has changed. For almost two decades now, readers have been presented with complex, sophisticated fiction about the American Indian experience by Indian authors, and the appearance this year of three new novels by Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris, and James Welch suggests that we are witnessing another wave of American Indian fiction likely to surpass even the explosion of the late sixties and early seventies that brought us Momaday’s House Made of Dawn and The Way to Rainy Mountain, James Welch’s Winter in the Blood and The Death of Jim Loney, Leslie Silko’s Ceremony, and Gerald Vizenor’s Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine brought a new voice into American Indian fiction in a dramatic way, winning the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1985, as well as the Los Angeles Times award for the best novel for that year and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters prize for the best first novel of 1985. This year, The Beet Queen, Erdrich’s second novel, seems destined to increase this Chippewa author’s audience and critical following. Erdrich’s Love Medicine obviously worked for American readers and critics, becoming that rare thing among novels by minority writers, both a best seller and critical success. It told a story of contemporary Indian life with a narrative complexity and beautifully rendered lyricism that kept pain at a 54 Western American Literature distance. Lives and loves fail in Love Medicine, but not with the whetted edge found in fiction by such Indian authors as Silko and Welch. This first novel by Erdrich focuses on a community, avoiding psychological depth through a constantly shifting narrative and complexity of surface. The fragmentation of the Indian community in this novel, the rootlessness that results in an accumu­ lation of little, mundane tragedies amongst the assorted characters in the interrelated stories, suggests the enormity of what has been lost to the Chippewas Erdrich writes about. But nowhere is the conflict between Indian and White communities merely explicit. At times the reader feels acutely that it isn’t always emotionally profitable to be Indian in the world of Erdrich’s first novel, but the deracination, alienation, and pain merge into a kind of gentle angst muted by an elegance of style. In Love Medicine, readers are allowed into an Indian world sans guilt, a wonderfully textured, brilliantly rendered fiction where the non-Indian reader is not forced to feel his “outsideness.” Erdrich’s second novel, The Beet Queen, submerges the pain of Indianness in America even more deeply than did Love Medicine. The Beet Queen is a story of women without reservations, hung out to dry on the flat, dull edge of the Minnesota-Dakota heartland in a small town that could be anywhere or nowhere. The story is again told through multiple narratives in a kind of triangulation that zeros in on Argus, a town that seems almost an empty place on the map. The prose is again lyrical and dazzling, with a resistant surface that forces one to read the novel sentence by sentence while growing increas­ ingly aware that he is being denied the modernist indulgence of breaking through to symbolic...