Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy

She slept through the first wan auguries of dawn, gently washed with river fog while martins came and went among the arches. Slept into the first heat of the day and woke to see toy birds with sesame eyes regarding her from their clay nests overhead. She rose and went to the river and washed her face and dried it with her hair. When she had gathered up the bundle of her belongings she emerged from beneath the bridge and set forth along the road gain. Emaciate and blinking with the wind among her rags she looked like something replevied by grim miracle from the ground and sent with tattered windings and halt corporeality into the agony of sunlight. Butterflies attended her and birds dusting in the road did not fly up when she passed. She hummed to herself as she went some child's song from an old dead time.

In a remote Appalachian cabin, a woman named Rinthy bears her brother's child. Her brother, Culla, takes the infant out to the forest and leaves it, telling Rinthy that it died. But the infant is saved by a passing tinker, whom Rinthy sets out to track down, first for her child's body, and then, learning the truth, the living child. Culla sets out after Rinthy, but he'll never find her again: their paths have diverged permanently. He wanders around the mountains, taking odd jobs where he can find them, narrowly avoiding the judgment of posses who find his shiftlessness suspicious. He's followed closely by three sinister men known only as "the Trio," who seem to be murdering those who cross Culla's path.

The Trio are the most Cormacesque element in Outer Dark. Anyone who's read Blood Meridian or The Road will see in them a kind of trial run at the frightening figures of those novels. It's tempting to see them as a kind of precursor to the Judge in Blood Meridian, but I don't think that's quite right. The Judge is a gnostic, an amoral killer, but the Trio are explicitly depicted as a kind of vengeful force, perhaps even a kind of justice. What's interesting about them is that the justice doesn't seem to be very well targeted: Culla first meets them face-to-face after escaping a horrible ferry accident that kills two other men and a horse. He meets the Trio at a campfire--where they are eating a meal of suspiciously unidentifiable meat--where they clearly suspect that Culla has killed the two men. They see his new boots and think them stolen, and in this they're partially right: he stole them, not from the ferryman or his client, but a rich squire--who, ironically, was later killed by the Trio! They know that Culla is guilty, but he's not quite guilty of what they say he is. Does that matter? And if the Trio is set on dispensing justice upon Culla, why is it that they kill everyone who comes into Culla's path but him?

There's a suggestion here, I think, especially when you consider the Biblical allusion of the title, of the idea of original sin, a fundamental evil that moves miasmically through existence and poisons everything. Culla's original sin is the impregnation of his sister and his attempted killing of the infant, and this poisons his path. Everyone he comes into contact with it is, in a sense, killed for it; but he himself will be punished for something else. And if original sin is something that's passed from one generation to another, it makes sense that the infant gets it worse--in a scene that prefigures the most horrifying moments of The Road, and which I will decline to describe.

Reading McCarthy's Southern Gothic novels, written before his move to the Southwest, reveal how much of Faulkner is in him. The flyblown language, the literal darkness of the primitive landscape, these seemed to me to be directly inspired by Faulkner's Mississippi. McCarthy's Appalachia is a primitive place--I think the word he'd use is atavistic--but the archaic language works here especially because it highlights a kind of timelessness to the narrative of sin and perdition. Blood Meridian and the Texas novels do that, too, but I also think they only makes sense in their historical context; they're novels of a particular kind of violence and conflict produced by the American frontier. Outer Dark, by contrast, has the out-of-time quality of a fable. It's a minor McCarthy, for sure, but I found a lot to appreciate in it.

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

On any day of the year Grace Thrale might be smiled at in the street by an elderly couple or by some young mother herding her noisy brood: saluted, that is, as a kindred spirit. Caroline Bell never attracted this delectable complicity. There were times when Grace wished the world were not so sure of her, so confident that boredom had claimed her. Yet in her daily existence feared the smallest deviation form habit as an interruption that might bring chaos. Grace no more wanted adventure than Dora wanted peace. She did not convince herself, as some women do, that she retained capacity for a wholly different existence ruled by exalted and injurious passions: Grace knew perfectly how the practised conformity of her days gratified her own desires. Yet one might cling to security and still be bored by it. In its first appeal, security offered an excitement almost like romance; but that rescue might wear down, like any other.

Grace and Caroline Bell are sisters from Australia, and orphans, whose parents have died in a ferry accident. By the time The Transit of Venus begins they have already been shuffled off to England, looked after by their depressive aunt Dora and an astronomer named Sefton Thrale. Caro is the beautiful one, the one who enchants; Grace is beautiful, too, but a more practical and everyday kind of beauty. She marries quickly, to Sefton's son Christian, a bland bureaucrat who offers stability and security. It's Caro that sweeps Ted Tice, a junior astronomer who arrives to work with Sefton Thrale, off of his feet, sparking an ardor that he will cherish and nurse all of his life. He tells Caro he will meet any requirement, but Ted's unwavering loyalty is not that kind of love that Caro is looking for; she drifts instead to Paul Ivory, a playwright and rake who is, in addition to being kind of a jerk, married. Her affair with Paul flowers and dies, and eventually she marries another bureaucrat, an American, but Ted's love survives even this marriage, survives her husband.

Is Ted pathetic or heroic? You can't say he's a romantic, really, except in the narrowest sense. His love resembles a train, something set on a track from which it can never be moved. We learn late in the novel that, in the very beginning of Caro's relationship with Paul, Ted learned a terrible secret about Paul, one that could have destroyed his life. Though Ted might have used this secret to his advantage, he never does, and perhaps this is the final statement about love as virtue: it's Ted alone, in the novel, whose love seems not like a kind of self-gratification. His abasement before Caro may not seem dignified, but it is love, and perhaps the purest kind. The Transit of Venus follows the two sisters in their separate lives, growing older, having affairs or merely fantasizing about them, having kids. Ted is kept off the page for long stretches, but it seems to me that his love for Caro forms the novel's spine and gives it a kind of shape. It's always there, lurking in the background.

I really enjoyed the writing in The Transit of Venus, which is lush, luxurious, and full of sharp detail. It's the kind of book that forces you to go slow; skip over a line and you run the risk of having missed the key to something. But I wasn't sure about the whole of the novel. It strikes me as one of those books where every page works, but the whole feels like it's lacking something. I never felt like Caro or Grace resolved into a psychological whole, or even a collection of traits that added up to something terribly interesting. (Caro, I think, is one of those characters who are magnetic and charismatic because they are magnetic and charismatic; we are asked to take Ted's love as a kind of credit on her personality.) The novel's attempts to situate its characters in a post-World War II Anglosphere--Australia, Britain, Canada--struck me as sort of half-baked and unpersuasive.

Here's the thing that annoyed me the most: the way The Transit of Venus waits until the end of the novel for a "big reveal" that's supposed to recontextualize the entire thing. To explain it, I have to give a spoiler alert. But here's what happens, more or less: Paul Ivory, years after their affair, confesses to Caro that he had affairs with men as well as women. He was being blackmailed by a lover whom, in a strange incident, he let drown. This is the secret that Ted Tice, having seen Paul and the lover--on the bank of a river that Paul soon learns is downstream of a broken dam, about which he does not warn the blackmailer--could hold over Paul if he wanted to. Paul's affair with Caro is a way of striking back at Ted Tice, who never even struck first. This is all very interesting in the way it makes us reconsider Ted, and confirms our worst ideas about Paul, but I found the "reveal" inorganic and wedged in, and very strange in the context of a book that is otherwise mostly bare of "incident." It felt cheap and a little condescending. Worse is the very ending of the book, in which Caro finally accepts Ted's love, only to board an airplane that immediately crashes, leading to Ted's suicide. We are asked to read between the lines to pick up these details: Hazzard tells us 100 pages previous that Caro's ophthalmologist will die in a plane crash en route to Rome, then Caro sees him on the plane. I thought this ending rather lame, and I found the suggestion that I was supposed to piece it together kind of stupid. I liked the book a little better, actually--for its richness, its depiction of the ebb and flow of ordinary lives--before I pieced it together.

The Tenth Man by Graham Greene

Charlot stared back at him with horror. The fleshy and porky figure of the actor momentarily was transformed into his own ideal--the carnal and the proud, leaning negligently there on the axis of the globe offering him all the kingdoms of the world in the form of six freehold acres and a house. He could have everything--or his three hundred francs miraculously renewed. It was as if all that morning he had moved close to the supernatural: an old woman was dying and the supernatural closed in. God came to the house in an attaché case, and when God came the Enemy was always present. He was God's shadow: he was the bitter proof of God. The actor's silly laugh tinkled again, but he heard the ideal laughter swinging behind, a proud and comradely sound, welcoming him to the company of the Devil.

A German prison camp in France. The prisoners are told that one out of ten of them will be liquidated in the morning, and they may choose among themselves. Thinking it fairest, they draw lots; among those marked to die is Chavel, a wealthy man. Chavel desperately offers all his fortune and estate to anyone who will take his place. Janvier, a man dying of tuberculosis, takes him up on the offer, which will provide for his mother and sister. Later, when Chavel is released, he travels back to his country estate. Under the name Charlot, he takes a job as a servant in the household and falls in love with Janvier's beautiful and bitter sister, who waits for the "real" Chavel every day so that she may spit in his face, and then shoot him. 

In many ways, The Tenth Man reminded me of Daphne du Maurier's incredible novel The Scapegoat, but reversed: in Du Maurier's novel, the protagonist is mistaken for a rich man who may have been a Nazi collaborationist, and must play the part in order to be accepted by his "family." Greene's Chavel/Charlot must deny his identity and his connection to the estate; of course, it's no surprise that the subterfuge transforms him into a real servant, a humbler and more generous man. It's a great premise--Greene wrote it as a treatment for a film that was never released, although after its publication as a novella, they did make a movie of it with Anthony Hopkins--but to Greene's credit, he recognizes that the premise needs a wrinkle, a turn. He introduces the character of Carosse, a malicious professional actor who recognizes that, in the wake of the war's end, he can use his actorly skills to transform himself into whoever he wants. Hearing second-hand the story of Chavel, he shows up at the estate claiming to be Chavel, and even schemes to "re"-possess it using a law that invalidates property transfers during the war. Carosse is Chavel's true doppelganger, a man who delights in subterfuge instead of living by it by necessity, and who takes up the identity that Chavel has cowardly forsaken. It's Carosse who, of course, will provide Chavel the opportunity to make good on his cowardice in the prison yard, and offer himself up for sacrifice for a greater good.

The Tenth Man is subtitled "a novel," but it's really a novella, unmistakably a minor work, though it has all the hallmarks of a great Greene story. The prose is so effortless and smooth that it reads to me like a man in the self-assured late stages of his career. (Certainly it is more classically "Greene" than his other late works, like Doctor Fischer of Geneva or Monsignor Quixote, which have a kind of strangeness that reads like boredom with his familiar topics.) It's packaged with a couple other treatments for movies that were never made, one of which, "Jim Braddon and the War Criminal," sounds like a kind of twin to The Tenth Man: Braddon, who bears a striking resemblance to an escaped Nazi, crash lands in the South American jungle where said Nazi is said to be on the lam. Having contracted amnesia, Braddon is captured and must face his "identity" as the Nazi, until the look of self-sacrifice and remorse on his face convinces a court psychologist of the mix-up. It's a fun little idea, over the top even for Greene, but it resonates in an interesting way with the doppelgangers and identity swaps of The Tenth Man.

The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein

This is now a history of a number of men and women from their beginning to their ending; these will have then the last touch of being that a history of any one can give to them, sometime it will be that any one who ever was or is or will be living, sometime then it will be even if they have had only a very little of any living, sometime then it will be that every one will have the last touch of being, a history of them can give to them, sometime then in my feeling there will be a history of every kind of men and women, there will be a history of every one from the beginning to their ending, every one will have sometime before the ending the last touch of a being a history of them can give to anyone.

First of all, yes, it's all like that. Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans is one of the most baffling books I've ever read. The vocabulary is simple, but the sentences are mazes of repetition that lurch sometimes into ungrammatical thickets or contradict themselves. Ove rand over again, Stein gives minor variations on the same sentence, with new clauses added or slightly adjusted, and then again and again, for paragraphs and pages. The structure is all like the passage above, making large claims about men and women, their living, their being, their history, etc., etc. The vocabulary is simple, even to a fault, but the experience of reading 400 pages of sentences like these manages to strip these simple words--living, history, being, men, women, even eating, drinking, etc.--down to an alien aspect.

The story--there is a story, despite everything--focuses on Alfred Hersland and his marriage to Julia Dehning. Stein begins by telling the story of their marriage, which, despite being unsuccessful seems rather unremarkable, and then expanding outward to tell the story of the whole Hersland family, including Alfred's grandparents, parents, and his siblings Martha and David. It extends also to many of the minor figures who people the lives of the Herslands, including friends and servants; we're told over and over again (and I mean literally a hundred times at least) that the Herslands are wealthy but choose to live in a section of Gossols, Stein's fictionalized version of Oakland, California, where no other rich people live. This is an interesting detail, but the lives of the Herslands are otherwise pointedly unremarkable, and unremarkable in a way that allows Stein to take them as avatars of the human condition that is the real subject of the book. (The title's claim that the book is about American lives seems even too limited.)

If I got something out of the book--and I can't claim to have gotten a great deal--it's this idea: that at their heart, human beings are not so different from one another. For Stein, everyone has an essential being (she uses the term "at bottom") that is shared with other people of the same "type"; a personality may be a mix of these different types, but it presents nothing unique or new. Human identity is a kind of repetition, a repetition that mirrors the repetition of the prose. There's a kind of beauty in this, Stein suggests (I think), in that it unites all people into a common being and history. Over and over again, Stein remarks that at some point there will be a full history of all human beings, suggesting that The Making of Americans is a step toward the project of understanding not just humans but humanity.

But I could be wrong. Frankly, this book defeated me like few other books ever have. Outside of a few flashes of interest, or the smooth wear of the prose dulling my senses as it wired my brain, I can't say I enjoyed it.

Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill

EDMUND: The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can't see this house. You'd never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn't see but a few feet ahead. I didn't meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted--to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.

A couple weeks ago, we got to tour Eugene O'Neill's house near Oakland, California. I knew nothing about O'Neill--it's possible he's the most important author I have no real experience with or knowledge about--but the house made an impression on me. It's in a beautiful spot, high in the golden hills of the East Bay, with a square-on view of Mt. Diablo. The house itself is odd, a white cinder block affair filled with African masks and odd chinoiserie (O'Neill and his wife called it "Tao House"). In his bedroom, O'Neill had a black mirror, as hideous and dour a decorating choice as any I've ever seen. But on the other side of the bedroom, past a number of intervening doors meant to keep out guests, was O'Neill's study, where, as the guide explained to us, O'Neill shut himself up to write the masterwork of his life, Long Day's Journey Into Night, a fictionalized version of his own upbringing. The experience was so difficult and cathartic that he emerged afterward like someone coming up from the sea, and made his wife Carlotta promise it wouldn't be published until several decades after his death.

These are the terrible secrets that plagued O'Neill, and which are transposed into the life of the Tyrone family of Long Day's Journey Into Night: before O'Neill was born, his brother Jamie inadvertently caused the death of another, infant brother, Edmund, by ignoring their mother's command to not go into the baby's room when he had measles. Grief-stricken, father James implored wife Mary to have another child to replace the lost one; this was O'Neill. The birth was so difficult that it set Mary on a path to lifelong morphine addiction, a fact that explained Mary's distance as a mother, though O'Neill never knew about it as a child. Long Day's Journey Into Night puts these various strands of crossed guilt on display: Jamie Tyrone's guilt at having killed the infant Edmund; Eugene's guilt at having caused his mother's addiction; James and Mary's guilt about the insuffiencies of their parenting, and the resulting resentment toward their sons. Only, O'Neill makes one switch, subtle and profound--he names the protagonist Edmund after the real-life dead son, and the dead son Eugene. Take what you will from that.

The main thrust of Long Day's Journey Into Night seems to be that "truth will out." Set, as the title suggests, over a single day at the Tyrones' fog-cloaked summer house, it depicts the family driven to a breaking point by the looming diagnosis of Edmund with tuberculosis. James and Jamie try to keep the diagnosis a secret, from Edmund at first, and especially from Mary, whose distrust of doctors and fear of losing another son can be easily traced back to the infant's death. The details come out drib by drib, and only in moments of intense pressure and anger. The characters are constantly confessing things, and then admonishing themselves or others to shut up about them; the Tyrone family lives in a fragile but totalizing web of self-repression that they require to continue a baseline of functioning. Confessions and outbursts are lubricated by drink; the three men seem to inhale inhuman amounts of whiskey from morning to night, while Mary slips further away from them, into a morphine fog. The most powerful scene, perhaps, comes at the very end (of course) when Mary descends the stairs into the room where the men are drinking and recriminating, holding her wedding dress, having mentally receded to her youth, before the point at which she was forced to decide between her love for James and her desired life in the convent.

The way our guide described it to us--and again, I know so little about O'Neill, that I'm sure this explanation is painfully simplistic for anyone who's more acquainted--O'Neill ushered a transition on the American stage from shallow entertainments like musicals and Vaudeville to a tradition of serious realism. (It's easy to see, now, the way Edward Albee drew on the play for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, another play about serious repression in a single family.)  Long Day's Journey Into Night might mark a prototype, but as is often the case with prototypes, it is in itself something really stunning and not quite surpassed. The last act especially is full of rich and desperate language, the kind of things that people say when they are creative, overeducated, and miserable. I enjoyed the running battle between Edmund and James over their literary heroes; James is an old school Shakespearean actor and Edmund reads Baudelaire, Nietzsche, etc., authors that James regards as unhealthily morbid. In the end, O'Neill's widow published Long Day's Journey almost immediately after his death, which, in a way, seems appropriate, because as the play suggests, you can't keep the truth under wraps for very long.

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Every night now Guitar was seeing little scraps of Sunday dresses--white and purple, powder blue, pink and white, lace and voile, velvet and silk, cotton and satin, eyelet and grosgrain. The scraps stayed with him all night and he remembered Magdalene called Lena and Corinthians bending in the wind to catch the heart-red pieces of velvet that had floated under the gaze of Mr. Robert Smith. Only Guitar's scraps were different. The bits of Sunday dresses that he saw did not fly; they hung in the air quietly, like the whole notes in the last measure of an Easter song.

Four little colored girls had been blown out of a church, and his mission was to approximate as best he could a similar death of four little white girls some Sunday, since he was the Sunday man.

How could a novel like Song of Solomon exist? It's so overloaded with moments, images, ideas; it actually seems to totter like an overburdened basket, sure to fall over. Although I haven't read all of Morrison's books, I feel safe in saying that only Beloved comes close to the sheer scope and audacity of this novel (and in my opinion, Solomon easily outpaces it). I'm planning on teaching it for the first time in many years, and for every key detail that stuck in my mind--the doomed flight of the insurance salesman at the beginning of the novel, Milkman earning his nickname by feeding at his mother's breast well into his childhood, Pilate's name hanging from a box in her ear--there's another that I had forgotten all about--Reba's uncanny luck, Circe luxuriating in her dead master's house with her pack of dogs, Hagar's attempts to murder Milkman... How does it all manage to work together?

The word that comes to mind for me when reading Song of Solomon is "inheritance." What can be handed down, and what must be left behind? The inheritances in Song of Solomon are often unwanted: Milkman inherits his father Macon's self-centeredness and materialism in the same way that the mistaken name "Macon Dead" is passed down through the generations. Pilate's name is essentially meaningless, plucked out of the Bible by an illiterate father, and yet she treasures it by keeping it in her ear. Men and women fight to pass on their own secret souls to their children; when Ruth continues to give the child Milkman her breast, it seems to me that she is trying to claim him by bestowing something upon him from his own body, and thus fend off the cruel, possessive Macon's more aggressive claims on her only boy. In contrast, Pilate's navel-less stomach shows how her mother died in childbirth and was unable to pass anything on at all. And, of course, there's the literal inheritance of the book, a bag hanging from Pilate's ceiling that Macon believes contains a stash of gold they discovered together in the wake of their father's death. The bag of gold is one of literature's most powerful MacGuffins, and through a series of convoluted turns, is transformed into something far more meaningful, a real inheritance. (Although, having read this book probably four times now, I don't think I can faithfully render the shaggy dog story that results in Pilate stealing her own father's bones without knowing it.) Milkman's journey into the South undoes the great migration and performs inheritance in reverse, seeking out the secret messages and forms that lurk in his own psyche in the same veiled way as the song that children in Virginia sing about his ancestor, Jake Solomon.

But for my money, nothing in Song of Solomon is as effective or unnerving as the character of Guitar and the group of the Seven Days. Guitar is Milkman's best friend, but he comes from poverty while Milkman comes from the Black upper class. He routinely chides Milkman for caring too little about civil rights, and he's right, but Guitar's sense of bitter injustice leads him to join the Seven Days, who are tasked with "keeping the balance" by murdering an equivalent white person whenever a Black person is killed by white. (Guitar's ultimate turn against Milkman is fed by the need to fund a mission to kill four white girls after the Birmingham church bombing of 1963). What is so frightening and effective about Guitar is that his terror ideology is seductive and compelling. The reasoning is wonky, bordering on innumerate--you don't "balance" unequal amounts by removing the same number--but the larger logic of a people who face a true existential threat is hard to dismiss, especially when compared to Milkman's wishy-washiness and naivete. The Seven Days are Morrison's Grand Inquisitor: a way of thinking that the novel rejects but nonetheless finds too powerful to entirely expunge. 

Because They Wanted To by Mary Gaitskill

He said he had never really thought about her sexually. He said he had to spend a lot of time getting to know a person before he had sex. He said this was all very unexpected and he needed to digest it. He asked if she would like to see a movie with him next week. She understood his words. She understood the sentiments that would seem, at least, to lie behind his words. But she felt something beneath those words that she didn't understand. She said she didn't want to see a movie. She said that if they got to know each other, they probably wouldn't want to have sex. She told him that if she'd waited to get to know people before having sex, she'd probably still be a virgin. She didn't understand what moved beneath her own words. It seemed too big to be chipped off in word form, but it didn't matter' she kept talking until the dentist stepped forward and embraced her.

Is it OK to say that I find relationships, and dating especially, to be a particularly boring subject for fiction? The relationships in Mary Gaitskill's short story collection Because They Wanted To are incipient, short-lived, doomed. The central theme seems to be the difficulty of true communication between people, the complicated back-and-forth of desire and revulsion that occurs when two people collide in intimacy for the first time. A woman dating an older man, a woman dating a younger man, a woman dating a woman. The protagonist goes out with someone despite misgivings, misgivings they don't quite understand, as they don't understand the desire. Sex ultimately complicates things even more; a desire for roleplay and debasement always ends up crossing a line: in one scene, a woman throws a hunk of non-consensual tapioca pudding at her lover's genitals. To Gaitskill's credit, she does all of these scenes very well, and the push-and-pull of desire and cruelty is well done, but on the whole the subject seems sort of television-tedious to me. Maybe it's my stage of life; maybe it's being married.

The stories became most interesting, I think, when they dealt with the thornier issues of consent and even rape. In one story, "The Girl on the Plane," the narrator strikes up a conversation with a younger woman who reminds him of an old friend. The old friend long nursed a crush on the narrator, which was not reciprocated, until she submitted to a drunken gangbang, in which the narrator ends up, to her--what? joy? surprise?--taking part. The woman on the plane opens up about her alcoholism, he reciprocates by admitting he took part in a rape. Was it really a rape? Or was the idea of the rape a fiction they engaged in, something titillating, that perhaps had the benefit of giving them both they wanted--for the girl, the guy, and for the guy, a way to have his cake and his cruelty, too? (The woman on the plane, of course, stops talking to him immediately.) Another story deals with a couple whose transgressive sexual habits include fantasies of control and domination, but where do the rape fantasies end and actual rapes begin? It's a difficult topic, and requires a great deal of writerly calibration; the ambiguity holds, and the stories never collapse into certainty or simplicity.

I think my favorite of them, though, is one of the most straightforward, the first story, "Tiny, Smiling Daddy," written from the perspective of a man who learns that his daughter has written an essay about him in a popular magazine. He spends the story fuming, resentful of his daughter; before he reads the article, he is sure that she has been unfair to him, and describes a kind of happy, safe childhood in which she grew up to be sullen and rebellious. Such things happen. Only at the story's end, when we are still unsure about how seriously to take his claims, does he recall the time when he said to her: "You're a lesbian? Fine... You mean nothing to me. You walk out that door, it doesn't matter. And if you come back in, I'm going to spit on your face." It's a pretty simple story, really, an old trick, the first-person POV that we're not sure whether we can trust, but it works really well here.

Rabbit Boss by Thomas Sanchez

I know of your Ancestors. The blood of your blood saw the Whites eat of their own flesh on yonder lake, Donner. Captain Rex gambled the money of the people away and lost his way in a blizzard, he came into a cabin and slept, when he awoke white bodies were lying dead all around him with the blood they had coughed up splattered on their clothes. he took their White death back to the people, that was the year all the Washo were burned to the ground at Elephant Head, one was saved, Ayas, the Antelope, who was sent into the valley of clouds to warm his sightless grandmother who wove flowing streams into her baskets... I can see into all the days past. I can see into all the days coming. Along the Big Lake of the Sky your son shall walk in a new Rabbit robe. Sparling his image on the quiet waters. The forest shall grow thick and free. The Birds return. The fences fall. In their shadow the openness will find its home once more.

Thomas Sanchez's Rabbit Boss begins with Gayabuc, a member of the Washo tribe of Nevada and Northern California, looking down at the infamous Donner Party. He watches them attack and eat each other, and he knows immediately that something evil has arrived in their lands. Rabbit Boss traces the history of this evil over four generations, beginning with Gayabuc, and continuing on with his son, Captain Rex, a gambler and petty criminal who makes money by recruiting other Indians to pick pigweed along the side of the transcontinental railroad. Captain Rex's son, a preacher named Hallelujah Bob, grows up among whites after all the other Washo are decimated by tuberculosis, and then burned in their huts by whites who fear the spread of the disease. Bob grows up knowing little about his background until he is taken to an Indian School (a real place in Carson City where, somewhat coincidentally, we were able to tour a small museum last week) and learns about his true identity. Hallelujah Bob's son is Joe Birdsong, who ekes out a proud but simple existence as a rabbit-hunter for large ranches during the Depression.

In Sanchez's telling, the Washo have always been a small tribe. They identify with the rabbit, whose medicine, or power, is small, but who gets by through tenacity and cleverness. They are few in comparison with the Shoshone or the Paiutes. Leaders of the Washo are said to wear the "Rabbit robe," and despite the designs that white settlers have on the land, it's exactly this identity and power that is passed down, perhaps unknowingly, to Birdsong. The stories of the four men resemble each other in certain important ways: the latter three are all, at times, hunted by white forces who want to destroy them or drive them out. For Captain Rex, it's marshals and bounty hunters that pursue him, in scenes that often provide the novel some of its blackest humor, as when the representatives of the federal and territorial government bicker over just who it is that's going to hang him, or when they realize they can't hang him, because the Nevada desert is short on trees. For Birdsong, it's a shadowy land company that has begun to make inquiries with all the landowners in the Lake Tahoe region. They begin by offering enormous sums, but when Birdsong refuses, they move against him with legal force, claiming that because Hallelujah Bob was not a U.S. citizen when he purchased the land (Native Americans were made citizens in the 1920s), his claim is null and void. They seize upon a murder and frame him for it, and Birdsong ends the novel like his grandfather: on the run.

As far as I know, the author, Thomas Sanchez, is not Native American, and I have to say, outside of perhaps Vollmann, I don't think I've ever read a fictional account of Indigenous history by a non-Indigenous writer that seems so scrupulously researched or knowledgeable. It was really something to be able to visit the actual residential school where Hallelujah Bob ends up, and where Birdsong must travel to search for the documents that prove his ownership of the land--I hadn't imagined such verisimilitude was necessary. It's especially impressive, I think, because the story is about the Washo, a small tribe whose history is not so popularly known as the Lakota or Cherokee, or even the larger local tribes like the Shoshone.

At the climax of his story, Hallelujah Bob has a vision of the Ghost Dance leader Wovoka (a member of the Paiutes, another Nevada tribe) who recognizes him as Ayas, the personification of the Antelope. Wovoka helpfully summarizes the novel for anyone who has missed it--Guyabuc has witnessed the arrival of a great evil, and Captain Rex has carried it along by unwittingly spreading the disease among his people, but Bob and his son Joe will oversee a rebirth of the Washo and the return of trees and animals. I found myself wondering, how does this novel think about the real-life prophecies of Wovoka? To me, it seems like there's a bitter irony here: Joe Birdsong ends up on the run just like his grandfather and his father did, hunted and dispossessed again. But then again there is the resilience of the rabbit power within Joe, and even when he is chased away by the predatory speculators, he ends up having a vision of ambiguous power on the shores of Lake Tahoe, the "Big Lake in the Sky." Is Joe the culmination of the rebirth of the Washo, as Bob hears from Wovoka--the one who wears the "Rabbit robe?" What does it mean to write such a book in the 1980s, and stop short of the next 50 years of the American Indian and environmental movements? I found Rabbit Boss troubling and ambiguous, but often very moving, even funny, and powerful.