In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William Gass

For we're always out of luck here. That's just how it is--for instance in the winter. The sides of buildings, the roof, the limbs of the trees are gray. Streets, sidewalks, faces, feelings--they are gray. Speech is gray, and the grass where it shows. Every flank and front, each top is gay. Everything is gray: hair, eyes, window glass, the hawkers' bills and touters' posters, lips, teeth, poles and metal signs--they're gray, quite gray. Cars are gray. Boots, shoes, suits, hats, gloves are gray. Horses, sheep, and cows, cats killed in the road, squirrels in the same way, sparrows, doves, and pigeons, are all gray, everything is gray, and everyone is out of lock who lives here.

William Gass' novella "The Pedersen Kid" is one of those stories--or, I guess, novellas--that stick with you a long time; it chills the blood beyond the effective description of the Midwestern winter, chills it like the kid of the title, found outside the narrator's house in a snowbank nearly dead. The narrator, too, is a child or a teenager, and the sight of the frozen "Pedersen Kid" stripped naked, dead-looking, being rubbed by the family's workman Big Hans, unsettles him. In a brief moment of wakefulness, the Pedersen Kid tells an ambiguous story of a gunman who's trapped his family in their root cellar, where they will surely freeze if they haven't been shot. Together, the narrator, his alcoholic father, and Big Hans go to investigate, and the brutal winter may be as dangerous to them as the gunman.

(OK, a spoiler alert from here on.) Although the gunman is never seen, he does seem to be real: the narrator hears the shooting death of both his father and Big Hans as they crouch outside the Pedersen house in the snowbank. The gunman leaves, but comes back after the narrator slips into the house, and much of the drama of the novella's final third is purely psychological: the narrator never goes into the root cellar to see if the Pedersen family is really there, though his imagination provides what appears to be an essentially impeachable truth. He senses that he and the "Pedersen Kid," recuperating in his own house, have been swapped or traded for one another. Because he and the Pedersen Kid are equivalent, the death of the Pedersen Kid's family precedes and has ensured his own. What the narrator experiences in the house as he waits for the gunman is not, in the end, fear, but joy--he's been freed from the cruelties of his father and the predations of Big Hans, who is subtly suggested to have been sexually abusing the narrator.

It's an astonishing, frightening story. It's united with the other pieces in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by the motif of the intense Midwestern winter. It's there in "Icicles," a novella about a real estate agent who becomes obsessed with the row of perfect icicles that have formed along his porch. He, Fender, has a boss named Pearson whose maxim is Everything is Property, and whose totalizing aggression reminded me of Shrike in Miss Lonelyhearts. Fender takes Pearson's maxim to heart, which is both affirmed by icicles on his porch--beautiful things which belong to his "property" and thus to him--and threatened by it--because the icicles are fundamentally fragile and liable to be snapped off by warming weather or mischievous children. Like "The Pedersen Kid," "Icicles" is primarily psychological; what "happens" is mostly contained within Fender's mind as he grapples with the possibility that he, too, is property, and yet the evanescent nature of the icicles suggests that might not as assuring or permanent a belief as one might expect.

But I think my favorite is the title piece, an extended description of Gass' hometown of "B," Indiana. Gass describes B and the larger Midwest as a gray and dreary place--you get the sense that it never experiences a season that isn't winter--and yet, in that grayness and dreariness there is much to capture the attention. Gass leaves no room for any cant about rural living--he calls the idea of farmers living close to the land "a lie of old poetry"--but also describes as being far superior to the hot and crowded life of cities, "swollen and poisonous with people." Though the piece--story? novella? essay?--is largely descriptive, it's addressed to a lover whose unexplained absence touches every scene and experience. To me, it's his kind of piece that allows Gass' tremendous verbal capacity to breathe, without getting caught up in the necessities of event and plot. It allows the reader to luxuriate in descriptions of "snow without any laughter in it, a pale gray pudding thinly spread on stiff toast"; and of the slinking cat, "is long tail rhyming with his paws."

Jawbone by Monica Ojeda

I'll try to explain it better: for me, the fear of the white age came on as my body was changing. First a rancid smell. Then nipples that rose up like hematomas, painful to the touch. Then the vaginal discharge, like fresh, whitish snot. The wiry hair. The stretch marks. The blood. That incompleteness and indefinition that disgusts about us is just as repulsive to me. Childhood ends with the creation of a monster that crawls around at night: an unpleasant body that cannot be trained. Puberty makes us werewolves, or hyenas, or reptiles, and when the moon is full, we can see how we lose ourselves (whatever it is that we are).

Fernanda, a young Ecuadorian teenager, wakes up to find herself chained to a wall. Her captor is her English teacher, Miss Clara. Miss Clara hunts and butchers a rabbit in front of Fernanda, who begins to fear that she is the next on the butcher's block. How did she end up here? A missing third explains it: Annelise, Fernanda's former best friend, who has convinced the Miss Clara that Fernanda has been hurting her, and that Miss Clara--already unstable from the death of her tyrannical mother and a previous experience being tied up by a pair of resentful high school girls--is the next victim.

Annelise, it turns out, is a skilled storyteller. She and her "group," including Fernanda and a trio of other girls, have been gathering for years at an abandoned building to tell spooky stories for years. Annelise is inspired by the "creepypastas" she reads on the internet--you know, Slenderman stuff. Such stories seem juvenile and silly, but in Annelise's hands they become truly frightening; she has spun an entire mythos about a "white age" controlled by a destroying "White God" whose symbols are the white alligator in the swamp and the disembodied jawbone that Annelise wears like a crown. These stories can only be told inside a windowless room painted, of course, white. But Annelise isn't just a storyteller; she yearns for the destruction embodied in the stories to become true, compelling Fernanda into quasi-sexual sessions of biting and choking. It' the bruises and scars from such sessions that allow Annelise to convince Miss Clara that her former best friend is a danger.

Jawbone is one of those rare masterpieces: a book that really shouldn't work at all, but succeeds in spite of that--or perhaps, because of its sheer bravado. You might think it would be cringe-inducing to write a book about creepypastas, but Ojeda reminds us--as Annelise reminds Miss Clara--that two young girls in the U.S. really did kill a classmate because they believed Slenderman demanded it. Jawbone really ought to feel like it's doing too much: throwing in not only the captivity narrative but Fernanda's conversations with her therapist, as well as an essay Annelise writes for Miss Clara that basically lays out the themes of the novel. Miss Clara's previous kidnapping ought to seem like too gratuitous a detail, not to mention the mysterious years-ago death of Fernanda's little brother. But, ultimately, these details contribute to the sense that Jawbone is audacious and unreserved, like the best horror books and movies. (Annelise insists that there is a difference between writing about horror and writing horror, but Jawbone is a testament to the way that horror can bleed through the margins we set for it.)

For Annelise, the White God and the white age are representations of the fundamental horror of living, and especially living as a woman. The white age encompasses the horribly bodily changes of puberty (see the quoted paragraph at top) but also the frightening cycle of creation and destruction that are motherhood and daughterhood. Annelise's group are spoiled upper-class Ecuadorian girls who have come to resent their mothers, who fear them; Miss Clara is so tortured by her mother's resentment that she dons her mother's clothes after her death and tries to become her. I was also fascinated by Jawbone's depiction of teaching: Miss Clara, perhaps because her students are kinds of surrogate daughters to her, is deeply and physically afraid of her students. So it is, by the tortured logic of horror, that by torturing Fernanda, Miss Clara revenges herself on her mother--and herself. The end of the book, though its final violence is only implied and not depicted, is one of the most unsettling conclusions to anything I think I've ever read.

Her Name Was Lola by Russell Hoban

'In Hindu mythology,' says Max, 'there's a dwarf demon of Forgetfulness called Apasmara Purusha. If this guy's Lola gets really pissed off she might find a way of putting Apasmara on to him to wipe out the memory of her.'

'That's really nasty,' says his mind. 'I like it. But what would get her that pissed off? Would sleeping with another woman one time do it?'

'I don't know,' says Max. 'It was just a passing thought. I doubt that I'll do anything with it--I'm not sure I like this guy well enough to write about him.'

One day, Max, a semi-successful but oft-blocked writer, sees a strange black demon crawling around on the ground. He lifts it up--or perhaps it jumps on him--and he discovers that he's become burdened by Apasmara, the Hindu demon of forgetfulness. What he has forgotten is Lola: the beautiful, intelligent woman he once felt was his destiny. Max hasn't seen Lola since a brief and unfortunate affair with Lula Mae, a gorgeous Texan, and impregnated both women. The last he saw of Lola, she was crashing her Jaguar--with both of them in it, and the unborn child of course--out of shock and anger at the news. Max doesn't even know if the child he supposedly fathered with Lola is alive, and now it seems that Lola has put the demon on him to make him forget her completely.

Once upon a time I was amazed by how different Russell Hoban's books are: medieval fables, post-apocalyptic epics, wistful and turtle-centric elegies, madcap anthropomorphic frenzies--but somewhere along the way they started to seem similar, even repetitive. The London of Her Name Was Lola is recognizable from Angelica's Grotto and especially The Medusa Frequency; I think it even shares a few minor characters with that book. The tricks are the same: the blurring of lines between reality and hallucination, the dragged-in bits of religion and mythology, and of course, the personification, even down to Max talking to his own mind. Some of them are successful, here, even extremely so, but I couldn't help feeling that something about the book was a little tired.

Some stuff I did find interesting: Max, like Hoban, is a successful writer of children's novels; Hoban wrote about Frances the Badger, and for Max it's Charlotte Prickles the hedgehog. He writes adult books, too, when he can get past "Page One," and as Max struggles with the fallout of his infidelity, he begins writing a story about "Moe Levy" who cheats on "Lulu" with "Laura." The doubling of names, the way the life is worked out on the page, like a fractal you can always keep zooming in on, is simple but effective, and I especially liked how, despite Max's attempts to make "Moe" reenact his own foibles, the rebellious character simply abstains from flirting with "Laura" and redoubles his commitment to the women he truly loves. I also liked Lola's B-plot, in which she spends years learning an Eastern instrument called the sarod in order to write a raga that will make Max forget her, only to find that in her studies she comes to a kind of peace with Max's carelessness toward her. But in the end, when I try to remember Her Name Was Lola, I'll probably only be able to come up with details from The Medusa Frequency instead.

The Yield by Tara June Winch

yield, bend the feet, tread, as in waling, also long, tall -- baayanha  Yield itself is a funny word--yield in English is the reaping, the things that man can take from the land, the thing he's waited for and gets to claim. A wheat yield. In my language it's the things you give to, the movement, the space between things. It's also the action made by Baiame, because sorrow, old age, and pain bend and yield. The bodies of the ones that had passed were buried with every joint bent, even if the bones had to be broken. I think it was a bend in humiliation, just like we bend at our knees and bow our heads. Bend, yield--baayanha.

August Gondiwindi is an Aboriginal Australian woman living in London. When her father dies, she races back to the small bush town where she grew up, and finds herself facing new traumas and old ones: there's the death of her father, of course, among the new, but also a new mining operation is threatening to push her widowed mother out of her house and destroy the land. Among the old traumas is the decades-past disappearance of August's sister Jedda, who still haunts the land. August finds herself prodding through the earth for clues once again, and even imagining that the funeral will bring her sister back at last. What August discovers, though, is that her father had been writing a dictionary of their language, Wiradjuri--and its record of "Native title" over the area might just be enough to stop the predations of the mining company.

Tara June Winch's The Yield is made up of three strands: the story of August's return; a long letter by an early 19th century German missionary that explains the history of oppression and violence the local Aboriginal people have faced; and excerpts from her father's dictionary. Of these, the dictionary is the most compelling; although I can think of other literary dictionaries (like Ambrose Bierce's), I don't think I've ever seen someone tell a story that way. August's father, in a kind of antipodean pique, goes through the English-to-Wiradjuri backwards, starting with yarran tree and ending with--what else--Australia. The definitions are reflective and personal, and not only manage to express something of an Aboriginal perspective on the world, but dole out, in pieces, bits of a powerful secret: his knowledge about Jedda's disappearance and his killing of the man who perpetrate it.

The other parts of the story didn't work as well for me. August never felt as real or interesting to me as her father, perhaps because the power of her grief gets crowded out by the plotty stuff about the mining company and the quest to save her mother's house and land. The story of Jedda, which gets told in such a fascinating way in the dictionary parts, never really gets integrated into the "main story," and the letter from the missionary seemed to me to be an awfully clunky and distracting way of providing the necessary historical context. Still, I was struck by the power of the novel's use of indigenous language as an instantiation of history and values; one thing The Yield makes clear is that the loss of the Wiradjuri vocabulary is as threatening as the loss of the land itself.

One thing I did find interesting about the novel is its exploration of syncretic Christian-Indigenous religion. August's father is a Christian who takes a lot of comfort in reading the Bible, but his dictionary reveals tensions between his Christian beliefs and traditional animist ones. The missionary, Greenleaf, describes intentionally blurring the lines between Christianity and traditional Aboriginal religion, allowing himself to describe Jesus as the "son of" the creator God Baiame. Toward the end of his letter, he expresses regret for this, describing it as a kind of lie. August's father describes, in his entry for "Biyaami's son," learning from an ancestor that they do not worship Biyaami or his son, but "the things He made, the earth." Biyaami's son "Gurra-gali-gali was just a son, a coincidence." This seemed to me to be an interesting contrast to novels in a North American Indigenous tradition, like House Made of Dawn, that often position syncretism as a kind of resilience.

The Vivisector by Patrick White

So far he had conceived in paint no more than fragments of a whole. If he were only free of women who wished to hold somebody else responsible for their self-destruction; more difficult still: if he could ignore the tremors of his own balls, then he might reach his resisted objective, whether through mottled sausage skins, or golden chrysalides and splinters of multi-coloured glass perhaps purposefully strewn on a tessellated floor, or the human face drained to its dregs, or the many mirrors in which his sister Rhoda was reflected, or all of these and more fused into one--not to be avoided--vision of G O D.

Art novels are always a challenge, primarily because words are not images, as much as we like to think of them that way. Novels about art that insist on giving detailed ecphrasis--that old Greek word for when Homer lingers on the reliefs on a shield for eighty lines--always fall flat, because the effectiveness of the art lies outside the capability of words to capture it. Better to leave it to someone like Patrick White, who writes about a successful and tortured Australian painter named Hurtle Duffield in his novel The Vivisector. White always has one foot in the world of vision and the world of the physical, even bodily and gross; an artist, of course, being tasked with bridging these two worlds and putting vision on the page. (In a way Hurtle is an extended riff on the Aboriginal artist Alf Dubbo of Riders in the Chariot, who struggles to paint the vision he shares with three others--except Hurtle's vision isolates him and leaves him alone.) And White is elliptical enough, too, never quite giving us a glimpse at what Duffield's paintings look like.

Hurtle is born to a poor washerwoman and her family; as a child he insinuate his way into the mansion of the Courtney family for whom she works. He's captivated by the aesthetic fineness of their life, symbolized by the grand prism of the chandelier and the rich aromas of Alfreda Courtney's wardrobe, into which she shoves his face. As it happens, the rich woman is so taken with the precocious Hurtle that she essentially buys him from his tearful mother for $500. This section is pointedly borrowed from Great Expectations; at one point, Hurtle's new sister Rhoda even looks at him and says, "You're common." But Rhoda is no Estella, designed to entice and torture; she's a sickly and disfigured hunchback who haunts Hurtle's life. A stolen glimpse at Rhoda without her clothes becomes a subject that Hurtle will attempt to paint for the rest of his life.

It's cruel, being an artist: you see what others wish, in many cases, that you didn't. An artist is the vivisector, opening up the guts of his subject and portraying them to the world. (Alfreda, who makes Hurtle pretentiously call her Maman, literalizes her own repression and hypocrisy by bankrolling anti-vivisection activism.) Hurtle vivisects Rhoda in his paintings as surely as he does when he paints the suicide of his pathetic tutor on the walls of his room. As Hurtle ages, the novel offers up a parade of women who become Hurtle's lovers and confidants, and in many cases, subjects: Nance Lightfoot, a genial prostitute who dies in a horrible accident near Hurtle's bushland cabin; Olivia Boo Davenport, a childhood crush who becomes Hurtle's lover and benefactor; Hero Pavloussi, a beautiful and doomed Greek woman who leaves her husband for Hurtle; Kathy Volkov, a piano prodigy who becomes Hurtle's "spiritual prodigy." (The aging Hurtle does indeed have sex with a thirteen-year old Kathy, which is in keeping with White's belief that all love is a kind of incest, and which means the YA book Twitter people can never find out about White.) Even, ultimately, Rhoda, who moves into Hurtle's home toward the end of both their lives after a long absence.

An artist, in White's telling, is cruel, but the cruelties are compelled: Hurtle is no more able to control the urge to paint something than he can control his sexual urges. Yet, the vivisection can be hurtful and even destructive. There's something voyeuristic about an artist; at one point Nance tells Hurtle that his landscape paintings even show him "pervin' on rocks." But God, too, according to Hurtle, is an artist and a vivisector, and life--vulnerable, painful, and strange--is God's art, God's vivisection. After a stroke, Hurtle finds himself struggling physical to paint, but still he hacks away at enormous boards with mangled hands, trying to paint his ultimate vision. At a retrospective of his work at Sydney's National Gallery--a chorus of priggish and philistine patrons whose conversations rank among White's funniest scenes--a rumor begins to spread that Hurtle Duffield is trying to paint God. For White, that's what painting is: not just an attempt to pin God to the canvas and make him visible, but to emulate God through the process of translating vision into the realm of the physical.

Gardens in the Dunes by Leslie Marmon Silko

I have a sister too, but this ship and you, Ocean, are taking me farther from here, Indigo whispered. She imagined Sister Salt on the depot platform in Needles, searching for her among the boarding school students returning home for the summer. Now the great ocean lay between them. Her plan for an easy way home had taken her much farther away. Tears filled her eyes and she cried softly into her pillow: Please help me, Ocean! Send your rainy wind to my sister with this message: I took the long way home, but I'm on my way. Please don't worry.

Indigo is a young girl of the (presumably) fictional Sand Lizard tribe, living in the Colorado River region where Arizona, California, and Nevada meet. When her family is swept up by soldiers during a Ghost Dance ceremony, she's separated from her mother, grandmother, and sister, and placed in a brutally repressive Indian school. She escapes, and finds a place to hide near the home of Hattie, a clever young woman expelled from graduate school for her unorthodox ideas about the early Christian church, and her husband Edward, an older naturalist living with the disgrace of a failed commercial expedition to South America. They take Indigo in to prevent her from being reabsorbed by the Indian school, and soon Indigo finds herself on a train bound to New York, and from there, a steamer to Europe.

Gardens in the Dunes is an interesting contrast to Leslie Marmon Silko's most famous novel, Ceremony, about a Laguna man suffering from PTSD after World War II. In that novel, Tayo learns that healing can be found in reconnecting with the rituals of his Laguna culture. Gardens in the Dunes is a more outward-looking novel, a global one, in which Indigo grows by being exposed to the wider cultures of the world--though like Ceremony it suggests that there is a power and safety in return. Indigo makes friends with a monkey and a parrot, and wherever she goes, there are gardens, from which she quietly takes seeds for her collection. When, at last, she returns to the "gardens in the dunes" of her Grandmother's country, she plants these new seeds, it is perhaps a symbolic expression of Indigo's going out and return. She brings the best things of the world back with her, and integrates them into her homeland. This is in contrast, maybe, with the rapacious pursuits of Edward, who sees in the natural resources of the world--orchids, citrus trees, iron meteorites--things to be purchased and sold for profit.

What I found most interesting about Gardens in the Dunes was the connections it draws between the Ghost Dance religion that developed in the 19th century and other unorthodox forms of Christianity. Wherever Hattie, Edward, and Indigo go, they are confronted by signs and symbols of repressed religion, including, in England, mysterious Druidic artifacts. Hattie has been dismissed because of her thesis, which emphasized the primary role of Jesus's female followers over the male disciples. Silko draws a direct line between beliefs and practices like these and the Ghost Dance, which was popularized by a "Messiah" figure named Wovoka in the late 19th century. Indigo has been taught to associate Wovoka explicitly with Jesus Christ, and in the great churches and chapel gardens of Europe, she insists again and again to Hattie and Edward that Jesus Christ was not crucified as the stories say, but traveling with his followers in the Americas. The Ghost Dance legend is another story of return and restoration: Wovoka, the Messiah, promised that the dance would bring back the many dead and lost who perished in American wars of conquest. It's no wonder that Indigo, torn from her family, holds tight to this belief--as meaningful in its way as any orthodox form of Christian theology.

I didn't quite expect a book like Gardens in the Dunes, having only read Ceremony. Ceremony is an inward book, a complexly layered story of memory and inward healing, but Gardens in the Dunes is a kind of adventure story. Its suggestions of erudition, its wide-ranging scope, and its 19th century setting, reminded me most of A. S. Byatt. Like Ceremony, it's more complex than it looks, introducing several minor characters--a Black cowboy cook, a thieving Mexican radical who operates a dog circus--whose presence make the book shaggy and strange. I'm not sure how I feel about the novel's final chapters, which feel somehow both anticlimactic and too pointedly dramatic--but it left me a lot to think about.

Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land by N. Scott Momaday

We humans must revere the earth, for it is our well-being. Always the earth grants us what we need. If we treat the earth with kindness, it will treat us kindly. If we give our belief to the earth, it will believe in us. There is no better blessing than to be believed in. There are those who believe that the earth is dead. They are deceived. The earth is alive, and it is possessed of spirit. Consider the holy tree. It can be allowed to thirst. It can be cut down. Worst of all, it can be denied our faith in it, our belief. But if we speak to it, if we pray, it will thrive.

Last week I had the great fortune to be able to visit Walatowa, the main community of the Pueblo of Jemez. Walatowa is the setting of N. Scott Momaday's novel House Made of Dawn; I received a grant in order to visit this and other Pueblo sites in New Mexico. Walatowa is closed to visitors, but has a visitor center with a small museum; a very friendly man there guided me to a photograph of Momaday's mother on the wall, in an exhibit about the local school. She was a teacher, a Kiowa who took a job with the Indian school service, and who brought her son with her. The photo reaffirmed something that I'd been thinking about during my recent re-read of the novel: Momaday, though he too is a Native person, was a stranger at Walatowa, as much a stranger as I was, and House Made of Dawn is a book written by an outsider, who saw in the place a certain fundamental beauty that speaks to larger truths about the world. Here's what Momaday writes about his childhood at Walatowa:

At the pueblo of Walatowa I came to know a world that was remote in time and space. I was twelve years old when my parents and I moved there. In my day the life of the town had remained by and large unchanged for hundreds of years. The people grew corns and melons and chili; they hunted deer and bear in the mountains, they captured golden eagles for use in their ceremonies. Time was told on a solar calendar, according to the position of the sun on the horizon. There were ceremonial dances and feast days of marked activity and color. I fitted myself into the ancient rhythm of life there and came to know that country far and wide on the back of a horse. Then that world began to change with the return of young men form World War II. Many of them had been psychologically severed from the traditional earth. It was a time of loss.

Yet, Momaday too suffered a kind of loss in the move, or if not a loss, at least a fundamental change, in the separation from the Kiowa landscape of his mother, father, and ancestors. In Earth Keeper, a new short book of prose poetry from Momaday, he writes about an old Kiowa man named Dragonfly who teaches a respect and regard for the living world. The earth, Dragonfly instructs, relies on our belief in it: "He was told every day he must pray not only to witness the sun's appearance, but indeed to raise the sun, to see to it that the sun was borne into the sky ,that each day was made by the grade of Dragonfly's words." What a responsibility--to pray the sun into the sky! And yet, Dragonfly describes a burden that each of us must take up, to be an "earth keeper" and maintain the processes that keep the spirit of the earth alive.

But Momaday never met Dragonfly, who was an old man when his father was a boy. "This happened a long time ago," Momaday writes about Dragonfly's lesson. "I was not there. My father was there when he was a boy. He told me of it. And I was there." As in House Made of Dawn, which includes a fictionalized version of the Momaday's Kiowa grandmother's story that is repeated more pointedly in The Way to Rainy Mountain, Momaday suggests that storytelling and oral tradition are methods of maintaining a link to the earth even when a physical connection is absent. I was touched to think of the young Momaday, impressed by the longstanding ties between the Jemez people and the earth, thinking of his own connection to his Kiowa lands back home in Oklahoma.

Earth Keeper is interesting because it is a reminder of the way that the lessons of House Made of Dawn and Rainy Mountain remain relevant in the 21st century. "Ours is a damaged world," Momaday writes. "We humans have done the damage, and we must be held to account. We have suffered a poverty of imagination, a loss of innocence." It's a shock to see, among Momaday's plainspoken and old-seeming language, references to climate change: "But on the immediate side there is the exhaust of countless machines, toxic and unavoidable. The planet is warming , and the northern ice is melting." Can we think of climate change as the inevitable result of the loss of ancient wisdom? That we have failed, collectively, to live up to Dragonfly's instructions to be an "earth keeper?" Earth Keeper is a small book, and may seem slight and light on ideas, but this, I think, is a powerful message, and it makes the book an important and interesting context in which to read Momaday's other books.