Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Know this: After two years, the best parts of me are still frozen in the lake--my limbic system; its best friend, the prefrontal cortex; and the hollow, pumping organ in which I keep benevolence. The only one that regularly comes to visit it Akiwenzii. In the winter they park their truck on the ice, drill a hole with the auger in the ice and fish until the cold makes their bones crack. As soon as the ice is off the lake, Akiwenzii is back in their boat, with a torch and a sort of pitchfork for spearing pickerel. In the dead of summer, Akiwenzii sneaks back before first light in their canoe, before the cottagers and their jet skis are out. In the fall, they sprinkle tobacco around me and sing.

A figure named Mashkawaji lies frozen in a lake. Immobile, waiting, they watch their friends go about their lives. Each of these friends is also a representation of a part of Mashkawaji: the old man Akiwenzii is their will, the old woman Mindimooyenh their conscience, the maple tree Ninaatig their lungs, giant Sabe their marrow, Adik the caribou their nerves, and a pair of humans named Asin and Lucy, their brain. All these figures, who live in more-or-less contemporary urban Toronto, are described as "they," as Mashkawaji is, even when their gender is clear. They are all, in many ways, fluid, and the borders between their identities are porous. They are individuals, but also part of a whole, and Mashkawaji, perhaps, represents a way of being that binds them, one that is frozen, but waiting for a future in which the wholeness can be truly whole again.

Noopiming is what one might call "experimental" fiction. That describes the characters and their relationships--don't think too hard, for instance, about how a maple tree climbs aboard a boat, or goes shopping. But it also extends to the printed page: many of the pages of Noopiming are a single sentence long, oriented at the top of a long, blank page. This captures Mashkawaji's plodding, patient perspective, but I imagine it must have spurred some cost-benefit analysis at the University of Minnesota Press. The reader is forced to slow down, to take each idea as it comes, and not get caught up, perhaps, in the bustling urban life that surrounds the characters. It sits sometimes in pleasant tension with the novel's contemporary language, and sometimes exposes it as clunky or silly. And sometimes one turns the page to find pure cringe, as when we learn the old woman Mindimooyenh as her "notifications turned on for Palestine." OK.

Noopiming didn't quite work for me. I liked best the character Asin, who spends his days at Tommy Thompson Park on Toronto's Lake Erie Shore, birding. Asin is not interested in expanding his life list (to each their own), but they must rely on eBird like the other birders; they, unlike Akiwenzii and Mindimooyenh, have lost the natural connection to the cycles of the earth that would tell them when the birds will arrive and when they will depart. As the book expands, it takes on additional consciouses, like that of Esiban the porcupine. I liked the long(-ish) discussion by a group of Canada Geese planning for their migration. Though it's not said, we are perhaps asked to imagine that these, too, are manifestations of Mashkawaji, parts of the frozen whole.