Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

Star- and moonlight hit the water. Down by the river, I sat on a rock, wishing I'd eaten and grabbed those pills and had a cigarette. Wishing I'd never heard of Antiques Roadshow. Maybe even wishing I was a winooch and didn't live on a reservation whose history was in a little museum and could be stolen for a buck. Didn't make any sense that parts of us were worth so much and at the same time we were worth so little. "You're nothing."

David is young when his mother, a Penobscot woman, leaves his white father and comes north to Maine to return to the reservation. It's disorienting for young David, of course, and not least because his mother has come to live with an older Native named Frick who seems to have a low opinion of David's connection to his indigenous background. David's sister, Paige, appears as well, mysteriously pregnant, and then mysteriously un-pregnant. As he grows up, David's life on the reservation becomes a checkered one. As a teenager, he develops an addiction to pills, and then methadone. As the lives of his mother, of Frick, and of Paige unravel in devastating ways, he finds himself--as he was as a child--challenged to provide meaningful support, or stability amid the chaos.

There is a familiar kind of story I have seen in many books by Native writers, a story in which lost Natives, mixed up with substance abuse or crime or simple despair and mental instability, find safety and wholeness by returning to their land. That's the story, more or less, of James Welch's Winter in the Blood, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn. Contemporary Native writers have been interrogating that story, I think, in interesting ways: Tommy Orange, for instance, in his novel about Natives living in urban Oakland, remarks that "the land is everywhere or it's nowhere." I'm interested in how Night of the Living Rez presents this story: David's "return" to the Penobscot reservation brings him closer to his sister and his grandmother, and to Penobscot life, but it's troubled in many ways that subverts the straightforward positivity of such narratives.

For instance, there's Frick: when David first arrives, Frick chastises him for his inability to shoot and hunt, suggesting this makes him deficient as a Native. It's only later (or I missed it the first time) that we learn that Frick is a western Native, not Penobscot at all--a small but clever dig, I think, at the way certain ideas about Native people dominate American cultural media. And yet, the reservation is always being mined for media. One subplot involves David's friend Ferris breaking into the Penobscot museum to steal a "root club," having seen one go for big bucks on Antique Roadshow. In the title story, a film crew trying to produce a documentary on the reservation ends up filming one of the most harrowing and traumatic experiences of David's life. These details provide a vision of Native life that is offered up as a consumable commodity, even as Natives like David remain, or feel they remain, estranged from it. Running from the cops, David ends up hiding out in a sweat lodge--a grimly ironic symbol, until he returns later to actually go through with the sweat lodge ceremony: "[A]nd right then my body sweated all that was left in it, which really wasn't very much at all." So there is a positive vision here; I don't mean to suggest there isn't--only that one of the things Night of the Living Rez suggests so eloquently is that sometimes, coming home isn't enough.

Not every story in Night of the Living Rez landed for me, but one thing I did really enjoy about it was its structure: David is the narrator of each story, but the stories are out of order chronologically; the book skips from child David to the teenage "Dee" to the adult, looking back. Partly this structure helps the book to subvert familiar expectations about problem and resolution, sickness and recovery, alienation and integration. Like my old friend Infinite Jest, it struck me how much Night of the Living Rez is a story about addiction--David waking up in a grain silo, David stealing money from his grandmother to pay for Klonopin, David adrift at the methadone clinic--and the structure reveals something about the halting and peripatetic nature of recovery. The title story, maybe the best story, reveals that it's not just David who struggle with substance abuse: Paige and Frick, too, stumble around like the zombies suggested by the title, and the abuse facilitates horrible acts that rupture lives. But although there are no simple solutions, life goes on--the "Living Rez."