The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch

As he tried to strike another match to light a cigarette, he realized that his hands were trembling. He wanted to believe that they trembled because of the cold, but he knew without thinking it that they trembled because there was no real love in his life; that somehow, at some time, everything had gone dreadfully wrong, and although it had something to do with his family, it had everything to do with himself.

Jim Loney lives a quiet life at the edge of the Blackfoot reservation in Montana. Once a star high school basketball player, his life has shrunk down to almost nothingness. He feels detached from it, detached from himself; he feels, as the protagonist of Welch's Winter in the Blood does, "as distant from myself as a hawk from the moon." Materially, things are not so bad for him: he doesn't seem to be especially hard-up or poor, and is well-liked--his old teammate Myron Pretty Weasel is constantly trying to get him to go hunting--and he has a beautiful, intelligent girlfriend, a white Texan named Rhea. And yet these things seem unable to penetrate the solitude of his spirit.

In one sense, The Death of Jim Loney is a "half-breed" story like Solar Storms or Ceremony: about a half-white, half-Indian person trying to find their place in a divided world. Rhea believes that it must be sort of nice to have two sets of ancestors: "you can be Indian one day and white the next. Whichever suits you." But Loney feels just the opposite, unable to connect to either of his lineages, not the family of his alcoholic white father, nor his absent Indian mother and the "reservation families, all living under one roof, the old ones passing down the wisdom of their years, of their family's years, of their tribe's years, and the young ones soaking up their history, their places in history, with a wisdom that went beyond age." There is a parallel to this divided life in the way that Rhea and Loney's sister Kate, a successful bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., spend the middle of the book in a cold war over who will get to take Loney away from Montana. Rhea wants to move to Seattle, Kate to take him home to D.C.; and Loney is split between two coasts (two Washingtons) even.

But Loney is unmoved; he doesn't want to go to either place. He is already in the place he feels he needs to be to figure out the nature of his life and his self; he is home, and yet these things remain hidden to him. In a sense, The Death of Jim Loney is a rejection of the "half-breed" narrative, in which resolution and healing can be found in embracing one's indigenous side. In Winter in the Blood, the narrator returns to himself by returning home and helping to dig a horse out of the mud (think I'm remembering that right), but the people who need Loney are all headed elsewhere.  Being in Montana, that ancestral homeland, provides no answers:

He had been thinking of his life for a month. He had tried to think of all the little things that added up to a man sitting at a table drinking wine. But he couldn't connect the different parts of his life, or the various people who had entered it and left it. Sometimes he felt like an amnesiac searching for the one event, the one person or moment, that would bring everything back and he would see the order in his life. But without the amnesiac's clean slate, all the people and events were as hopelessly tangled as a bird's nest in his mind, and so for a month he had been sitting at his table, drinking wine, and saying to himself, "Okay, from the very moment I will start back--I will think of yesterday, last week, last year, until all my years are accounted for." But the days piled up faster than the years receded and he grew restless and despondent. But he would not concede that his life had added up to nothing more than the reality of a man sitting and drinking in a small house in the world.

I suspect there's something of a feint happening here, that The Death of Jim Loney suggests that these healing processes are not so easy. While both an earlier and a simpler book than Winter in the Blood, it seems almost like a response or refutation. We start to suspect that Loney has been sold, through cultural osmosis somewhere, a kind of lie, that knowledge of your past will make you whole. He searches for the name of the woman who took him in after his mother left and his father abandoned, but knowing it does nothing for him. He sees his father in the bar every day, but when they finally speak after decades, nothing is revealed. And in the process Loney passes up on not one but two opportunities to take control of his life and make it into something different. The result is not that Loney gets to know himself better but that he gets to know the world less, and the preordained "death" of the title--spoiler alert, a violent suicide-by-cop--is the result of a fundamental misunderstanding about his own deeds and their relationship to the law, to the world of others.

Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King

First Woman's garden.  That good woman makes a garden and she lives there with Ahdamn.  I don't know where he comes from.  Things like that happen, you know.

So there is that garden.  And there is First Woman and Ahdamn.  And everything is perfect.  And everything is beautiful.  And everything is boring.

So First Woman goes walking around with her head in the clouds, looking in the sky for things that are bent and need fixing.  So she doesn't see that tree.  So they bump into each other.

Pardon me, says that Tree, maybe you would like something to eat.

That would be nice, says First Woman, and all sorts of good things to eat fall out of that Tree.  Apples fall out.  Melons fall out.  Bananas fall out.  Hot dogs.  Fry bread, corn, potatoes.  Pizza.  Extra-crispy fried chicken.

Thank you, says First Woman, and she picks up all that food and brings it back to Ahdamn.

Four elderly Indians--like, hundreds of years old elderly--disappear from a hospital somewhere in the middle west of the United States.  They're on their way, it seems, to Alberta, where a cast of characters converges on the reserve town of Blossom: Lionel, a 40-year old man whose dreams had long been shattered by a series of anti-Native misfortunes; Charlie, grappling with his father's abandoning him to play stereotypical Indians in Hollywood; Alberta (yes, I know), who loves Lionel and Charlie but can't imagine either of them giving her the child she desires; Eli, Lionel's uncle, who has returned from a comfortable life in Toronto to reside in his mother's shack, preventing it from being destroyed by an already-built dam.  These characters are all Blackfoot Pikuni, Indians living out their lives with an uneasy relationship to their own Indian-ness.  The four elderly Houdinis bring them together to "fix" some small part of the world, meaning both the problem of the dam and the problems of these characters.

Along with this narrative, King gives four versions of Native creation myths.  Each features a different first-woman figure--First Woman, Changing Woman, Thought Woman, and Old Woman--each of whom is associated with one of the elderly Indians, who seem to be telling these stories along with the trickster Coyote.  These stories are satirical and syncretic; they pull together not only different indigenous traditions but also the Bible, Moby Dick, westerns, and other Anglo cultural staples.  (This may explain why the old men are named Lone Ranger, Ishmael, Robinson Crusoe, and Hawkeye.)  These stories are often clever and funny, riffing broadly on the allusions they mash together, and they are meant to represent an indigenous worldview imagining its own relationship to the land and community in the midst of interference from settler colonialism.

Green Grass, Running Water zips along so breathlessly that you almost miss the cleverness of the way the four old men bridge the real world and the mythical or legendary one.  It also enables you to miss the thinness of the "real" story, and how it struggles to come together in a way that feels satisfactory or complete.  The best of these stories belongs to Lionel, whose pratfalls and misfortunes seem like a slapstick version of an Erdrich character--I particularly liked the detail that, as a teenager, Lionel accidentally got put on a plane to Toronto by a hospital nurse thinking he was supposed to have a heart transplant rather than a tonsillectomy.  (Although the error was fixed in time, his "heart trouble" prevents him from finding meaningful employment!)  It's the right kind of humor: broad and genial but also somehow sharp and funny, and the novel could have used more of it.  I found that the tone of the creation stories, which feature Coyote endlessly quipping like Kimmy Gibbler, ultimately wore thin, and that the "real" narrative didn't supply enough to balance it out.