Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles by Gerald Vizenor

The silver convertible continued creeping up the hill.  So loaded with bodies and firewood, the rear tires exploded.  The sound seemed to panic the whitepeople who started cursing and fighting.  Several whitepeople used sticks of birch and oak as clubs to beat a path to the red padded wheel.  Faces and ears were crushed under the blows of firewood.  Slivers were sticking from the heads of the whitepeople.  Noses were broken and teeth were smashed.  More and more whitepeople tried to pile onto the convertible.  The rear bumper was dragging and the plush seats were torn and broken.

Bigfoot and Pure Gumption managed to crawl through the whitebodies struggling for the wheel.  The tribal pilgrims ran ahead of the car up the school hill road.  The seven clown crows flapped and hopped from tree to tree following the mass of whitepeople beating each other for less than half a tank of gasoline.

In the near future, the United States of America has literally run out of gas.  The country has become something out of Mad Max: an apocalyptic wasteland of freaks and weirdos traveling across a collapsed and ruined landscape.  In Minnesota, Proude Cedarfair, the Ojibwe protector of a band of cedar trees, is pushed out by federal agents who want to ransack his trees for fuel.  He joins with his wife, Rosina, and a host of other pilgrims, to travel across the United States to the safety of the pueblos of New Mexico.  The other pilgrims include: an enormous transwoman deprived of her hormones, a bishop who says everything three times, a woman who has sex with her two boxers, a man with huge feet who is in love with a bronze statue, two dogs, one of which glows, a couple other people, and seven helpful crows.

The pilgrims' movement over the land is an ironic reenactment of manifest destiny: this time it's "mixedblood" Natives moving west, and backwards in time to the oldest inhabited places in North America.  Through their pilgrimage, the Natives seek to reverse the proliferation of a culture that has led to ecological, spiritual, and psychological death.  In Iowa, they confront an evil gambler by the name of Sir Cecil Staples who gambles travelers' lives against five gallons of gasoline; hideous and cloistered, Sir Cecil is the avatar of the dying age, which Vizenor positions as the third age of the Hopi, who believe a fourth and prosperous age is yet to be born.  But the dying culture throws up its challenges and pitfalls--not only Sir Cecil, but a walled town of poisoners, a restaurant that hangs witches, a mysterious lightning field, and all sorts of other ornate phantasmagoria.

The country is suffering from what Vizenor calls "terminal creeds"--ideas and beliefs that lead to disintegration and death because they have no adaptability, no capacity for change.  Most of them are held by "whitepeople," but the "mixedbloods" suffer from them, too, as when the character Belladonna Darwin-Winter Catcher speaks up to insist on her superiority as an Indian by blood.  For Vizenor, most claims of indigeneity seem to be a kind of terminal creed also, a rigid way of defining the self against others that leads to stagnation and paralysis, and which are opposed to the spirit of fluidity and play that characterize the pilgrims, who are often called clowns, a word which makes a lot of sense when Vizenor describes them all cramming into or spilling out of an automobile:

The doors on the truck cab and trailer opened and out flew seven crows, out leaped four dogs, one glowing, out stepped a mammoth and a giant and a child and an old couple with braids and a woman wrapped in a constellation quilt and a bishop dressed in his ceremonial vestments and velvet dalmatic.

Bearheart is an exceedingly strange book, unlike anything else I've ever read in form, content, or execution.  The closest thing to it is the otherworldliness of William S. Burroughs, but Vizenor also seems inspired by some of the wordplay of Barthes and the Oulipo movement.  Like Burroughs, Vizenor's vision is comically violent and extremely sexual.  And like Burroughs, the sexuality, even with its anti-conformist and comic elements, often seems to put a special burden on the female characters.  Why does Lilith Mae need to have sex with dogs?  Why does one of the most sympathetic characters rape Proude's wife at the end of the novel, and why do I have to pay attention to the violent and sticky details?

(On that note, I was completely unconvinced by the afterword by Choctaw-Cherokee scholar Louis Owens, which talked about being reported to his dean for assigning Bearheart.  "In the end I realized it wasn't the novel's irrepressible sexuality, not the violence or bestiality, not the transsexual shape shifting that upset my students.  It was the novel's outrageous challenge to all preconceived definitions, which Bearheart calls 'terminal creeds.'"  Are you sure?  Are you sure they weren't complaining about the scene where a band of roving "cripples" tears the woman Little Big Mouse apart for her body parts?)

At its most ingenious, Bearheart seems admirably unafraid and entirely new.  But at its worse, it feels unforgivably retrograde, in thrall to a style and ethic that once seemed avant garde but now seems painfully dated, even as it cobbles something wholly unique out of that style and ethic.  I couldn't tell you whether I liked it or not; it's one of those books that just doesn't seem to care whether you do, even though the characters themselves seem to be having a whole lot of fun on path through apocalypse.