English Creek by Ivan Doig

All I am trying to work into words here is that my father was a man born into the land, in a job that sometimes harnessed him to a desk, an Oliver typewriter, a book of regulations. A man caught between, in a number of ways. I have since come to see that he was of a generation that this particularly happens to. The ones who are firstborn in a new land. My belief is that it will be the same when there are births out on the moon or the other planets. Those firstborn always, always will live in a straddle between the ancestral path of life and the route of the new land. In my father's case the old country of the McCaskills, Scotland, was as distant and blank as the North Pole, and the fresh one, America, still was making itself. Especially a rough-edged part of America such as the Montana he was born into and grew up in.

Driving through Montana this summer, I got to see my first forest fire. It didn't look like much; it wasn't a big pillar of fire: just a few white curls of smoke up on a hill, though you could see on the state' digital map that it was quite large. More unsettling, in fact, was another day, when the yellow smoke drifted overhead from a fire we couldn't see and blotted out the sun. At the U.S. Forest Service Museum outside Missoula, we learned about how central fire prevention was to the organization from the very beginning: the vast resources and manpower committed to keep the forests of the west from blowing up. Just such a conflagration is the setting for the final third of Ivan Doig's English Creek, about a boy coming of age in exactly the Montana foothill country we passed through.

Jick McCaskill is fourteen years old. His father is a ranger in the Forest Service. It's the Great Depression. His older brother, Alec, has foreswore the college education his parents have planned for him in order to marry the beautiful Leona, and has taken a job as a cowboy with the area's largest rancher, and their parents are incensed. To Alec, cowboying seems an old Montana tradition, but his parents seem to understand that working for a huge ranch like the Double W is really another, more frightening version of the country's future, in which smallholding sheep and cattle ranches have been pushed out and consolidated. For Jick, the break between Alec and his parents is destabilizing, and he fears the dissolution of his family.

Alec's disappearance is one of two events casting a shadow over Jick's fifteenth summer. The other happens when Jick and his father, checking on the region's remote sheep ranchers, come across an old Forest Ranger named Stanley Meixell. Stanley is "camptending," delivering supplies to the ranchers' remote camps, and he's hurt his hand; Jick's father volunteers Jick's services for reasons that are unclear to the teenager. On the trip, Jick comes to understand that the history between his father and Stanley goes back much farther and deeper than he realized, and he spends the remainder of the summer trying to pry into that history. The ultimate revelations are rather less than shocking, but for Jick the knowledge stands in for a wider history of Montana and the "Two Medicine" district he grew up in; to understand Stanley--who, among other things, was the rancher who established the national forests' very first boundaries--might be to understand the world in which he was brought forth.

English Creek is one of those novels that might be described as a "love letter" to its particular locale. You know the ones--a love letter to Albania, a love letter to the Pacific Northwest, a love letter to Columbus, Ohio. Though the "Two Medicine" is a made-up pastiche, Doig's deep knowledge and love for western Montana is clear. You come out of English Creek knowing not just how to fight a forest fire, but how to pen sheep and harvest a hay crop. One thing it does well is capture just how fleeting our sense of a place really is: the Two Medicine country that Jick knows was more or less created by men like Stanley and his father, and in the hands of the big ranchers, it's already passing away. At the end of the novel, Hitler's invaded Czechoslovakia, and we understand that both Jick and Alec, at prime fighting age, will come to live very different lives than the ones they had anticipated.

Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada

Homo sapiens is sluggish in its movements, as if it had too much superfluous flesh, but at the same time it is pathetically thin. It blinks too often, particularly at decisive moments when it needs to see everything. When nothing's happening, it finds some reason for frenetic movement, but when actual danger threatens, its responses are far too slow. Homo sapiens is not made for battle, so it ought to be like rabbits and deer and learn the wisdom and the art of flight. But it loves battle and war. Who made these foolish creatures? Some humans claim to be made in God's image--what an insult to God. There are, however, in the northern reaches of our Earth, small tribes who can still remember that God looked like a bear.

Yoko Tawada's Memoirs of a Polar Bear is actually the memoirs of three polar bears: the first, an unnamed matriarch who writes an autobiography that becomes a best-seller in the Soviet Union; the second, Tosca, the matriarch's daughter, a circus performer who forges a close relationship with her trainer, Barbara; and finally Tosca's son Knut, who is brought up by human trainers at the Berlin zoo. Tosca and Knut are real--Tosca's "rejection" of Knut and the baby bear's successful adolescence at the zoo apparently having been the subject of much media obsession--but in imagining the writer-bear, Tawada gives Tosca and Knut a kind of formal pedigree that elevates them above mere bearness. The novel plays pretty loose with just how a polar bear might walk among human society: while the matriarch speaks Russian, and learns German so that she might write in it, Tosca seems to lose interest in speaking with anyone but Barbara. Knut, in the end, is the most "bear-like" of all, perhaps having lost the matriarch's gift of speech--though there are a precious few who seem to understand him, like his friend--I am not kidding--Michael Jackson.

The three sections of Memoirs of a Polar Bear do some interesting things with point of view and elements of metafiction. The matriarch's section seems to encompass both the best-selling autobiography and the process of writing it; much of it is taken up by the bear's grueling writer's block while living in exile in West Germany. Tosca's section is actually written from Barbara's perspective, though the two become so close that Tosca's "I" eventually starts to melt into Barbara's. And Knut's section pulls of what I thought was a neat trick: for a long time, it seems to be in third person, until another bear in the zoo mocks young Knut for referring to himself as "Knut"--and suddenly, as Knut learns what an "I" is, the narrative switches into the 1st person. Knut has been narrating all along. The tricks are neat, and it's a testament to Tawada's skill that the book can contain all of them without seeming gimmicky are overstuffed, but they point to certain interesting thoughts about the process of memoir and speaking about oneself. Does Tosca's need to have Barbara write her autobiography, for example, reflect a rejection of her mother's need to account for herself--to become more "bear-like" by rejecting the world of talky, wordy humans for the immediacy of bear life? And does it leave young Knut without the capability to communicate, when what he wants to do most in the world is be understood by his beloved caretaker and "mother" Matthias?

I was interested, too, in the way that the political overlays the three bears' stories. The matriarch's is a familiar story of Soviet dissidence, in which her autobiography is first celebrated, and then suddenly and mysteriously verboten; she defects to West Germany when it looks as if she'll be exiled to Siberia. (Though perhaps this would have been all right for a polar bear, who is always dreaming of cold environments, and who finds Berlin to be insufferably hot.) The politics of this section seemed sort of strange to me, as if they were a literary parody uninterested in being linked to anything contemporary. The contrast between West and East Germany is an important element of the novel, as it probably was for Tawada, who moved from Japan to West Germany in the 80s and who writes alternatingly in Japanese and German. Knut's section, on the other hand, has the bear grappling with the burden of being an avatar for climate change. Though little Knut lacks the stature or the tools of his matriarch, his notoriety at the zoo demands a kind of public account of himself, one that will stress to the world the need for conservation--a huge burden for such a little bear.

I thought Memoirs of a Polar Bear was really fun. I preferred the first and last sections, I think, perhaps not surprisingly, given the intentional narrative distance that Tawada imposes on Tosca, and which the aloof Tosca seems to impose on herself. I imagine they would frustrate a kind of reader who prizes internal consistency--when is a bear like a human being and when is it like a bear?--but the shagginess and slipperiness of Tawada's novel is part of its charm, I think.

Saving Yellowstone by Megan Kate Nelson

All three of these men--Jay Cooke, Sitting Bull, and Ferdinand Hayden--determined the future of the American West during the Reconstruction era. They were raised in different familial circumstances (Hayden's was the most hardscrabble and Sitting Bull's the most advantageous, born as he was into a family of Lakota chiefs), but they were all men of ambition. They discovered their talents as young men and worked to establish themselves as leaders in their respective communities.

They also had larger visions for the future of their nations, rooted in their beliefs about who should have rights as citizens and who should control the undulating prairies, jagged mountain peaks, and fertile valleys of the West.

I tell you what: Yellowstone is huge. It's bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined, and you can feel it if you try to drive the entirety of the "double loop" that makes up the park roads. It seems incredible, as you journey through it, that such a place was preserved forever by presidential proclamation, an absolutely colossal land set aside for public marveling and enjoyment, set aside, really, just to set it aside. But, of course, it wasn't an inevitability; the preservation of Yellowstone as the world's first national park under Ulysses S. Grant was the end result of decades of exploration, persuasion, and advocacy--and also, in the case of Indigenous people, dispossession. Megan Kate Nelson's Saving Yellowstone tells the story of the park's preservation through the eyes of three men: explorer Ferdinand Hayden, railroad tycoon Jay Cooke, and Lakota leader Sitting Bull.

It's Hayden who is the book's focus by far, an ambitious naturalist whose aims in exploring the Yellowstone valley were as much about his own stature as the advancement of science. When Hayden and his team set out for Yellowstone, it was nearly unknown to white Americans. Just two years before, the Langford expedition had confirmed the "tall tales" that western trappers had been telling about the Yellowstone for years: towering hot geysers, brilliantly colored pools, and land that smoked. (It had also brought national attention to the area when one of its members got lost for a month before being miraculously saved.) But it was Hayden's expedition, as Nelson tells it, that convinced the public, and President Grant, to set the "wonderland" aside, not least because Hayden cannily brought along a photographer, William Henry Jackson, and a painter, Thomas Moran, both of whose images brought the remote landscape into a national consciousness.

Nelson contrasts Hayden and his expedition with Jay Cooke, a railroad tycoon who nearly went bankrupt trying to build a railroad to the Yellowstone area that would open it up to general tourism. It was Cooke's railroad that brought the ire of Sitting Bull, who rightly saw the encroachment of the trains as an imposition on the land that had been protected by treaty, and who periodically attacked soldiers and survey teams. "That the creation of America's national parks required Native land dispossession is a hard truth," Nelson writes, "one that does not often appear in popular accounts of this movement." A great deal of what Nelson writes about was already familiar to me from watching Ken Burns' National Parks: America's Best Idea, but I did find that Nelson's realist cynicism about the violent requirements of the creation of Yellowstone was an effective balance to the Burns' idealism, even as he takes care to mention the indigenous owners of the parks' land.

It was the inclusion of Sitting Bull and the Lakota perspective that drew me to Nelson's book, though in the end neither the Lakota chief nor the railroad tycoon is really at the heart of the story in the way that Hayden is. (And though I suppose it's outside of the book's scope, I thought it was interesting that the 1877 flight of the Nez Perce through the Yellowstone, in which several white tourists were killed in retaliation for U.S. Army ambushes, was omitted entirely.) I also thought that Nelson's attempts to connect the preservation of Yellowstone to larger themes about Reconstruction in America fell a little flat. Toward the end of the book she notes that Grant and his allies would have seen no contradiction between preserving the rights of Black Americans and dispossessing the Lakota, seeing them both as part of a larger project of civilizing the country--but this was a theme I thought might have been developed more.

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

And three years later still, he lived in his second cabin, precisely where the old one had stood. Now he slept soundly through the nights, and often he dreamed of trains, and often of one particular train: He was on it; he could smell the coal smoke; a world went by. And then he was standing in that world as the sound of the train died away. A frail familiarity in these scenes hinted to him that they came from his childhood. Sometimes he woke to hear the sound of the Spokane International fading up the valley and realized he'd been hearing the locomotive as he dreamed.

Robert Grainier is, for all purposes, born on a train: he arrives at his aunt's home in Idaho on a train as a child from some place he cannot remember. He is a man of the New West, without a birthplace or history, and he aids the railroad in opening up the West by cutting down trees and laying track. When he's not working on the railroad he takes a job as a delivery driver, crossing over the backwoods tracks of Idaho's panhandle and western Montana. But he also has in him that spirit of the Old West, which is not marked by the march toward civilization and industry but a place where one goes to be alone: for much of the year he subsists alone in a cabin he built himself in a deep wooded valley, a cabin situated in the very spot where his wife and newborn died in a wildfire.

To me, Denis Johnson's Train Dreams is about the contradictions of the American west and its opening in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Grainier, when the whole of his life is laid out, lives through a grand transition, beginning life on a train in the wilderness and, later, seeing Elvis Presley performing on a train. Train Dreams is funnily meandering for a novella, passing from incident to incident, simultaneously grotesque and humorous, like the time he serves as an ambulance for a man who was shot by his dog. (How did it happen? Well, he tried to shoot the dog instead, but the dog got the better of him.) Or the story of Grainier's friend Kootenai Bob, who's given alcohol for the first time in his life and ends up so obliterated by a (heavily symbolic) train it takes his people weeks to find and ritually bury all the pieces.

But the through-line that keeps the novella grounded is the untimely death of Grainier's wife and child, who try fruitlessly to escape the wildfire in Grainier's absence. Their disappearance haunts Grainier, who wants to believe against odds that they might have found safety, but his wife appears to him in a dream, or perhaps as a kind of spirit, and shows him her death, but Grainier stays by the cabin out of a belief that the newborn Kate might somehow have survived. And he's right, in a way: Kate has been transformed into a half-woman half-wolf who visits Grainier's cabin one day with her pack, and though Grainier wishes profoundly that he could recover her, or perhaps domesticate her like his dog, her life can only intersect his at this single and infrequent point. Kate is a symbol, perhaps, of a return to wildness, the dream that people brought with them on the railroads and which was obliterated by the railroads.

Is it crazy to say that I didn't think Train Dreams reaches the heights of Johnson's best books, like Jesus's Son, Angels, and Tree of Smoke? Mostly because those books are so great, and their achievements are hard to equal, especially in a small and minor-seeming novella like this one. There's something intentionally and ironically understated about Train Dreams, I think, that subverts our expectations about the great epics of the West. It's a small book about a small life, but a life haunted, as many of us small people are, by the greatness of the country at our back door.

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money's worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money's worth. The world was a good place to buy in. It seemed like a fine philosophy. In five years, I thought, it will seem just as silly as all the other fine philosophies I've had.

Jake Barnes is an American, a Catholic, an expatriate living in Paris, a working man but a hard partier, living with a war injury that's left him unable to have sex. He's deeply in love with Lady Brett Ashley, a sexually emancipated, very droll "new woman" of the 1920s, but Jake's injury--maybe--has made their relationship an impossible one. Jake's friend Robert Cohn, a Jewish boxer, has also fallen in love with Brett--people tend to do that. When Jake, Brett, Robert, and Brett's fiancé Mike head down to Pamplona for the festival of San Fermin and the Running of the Bulls, the passions and resentments that they share boil over into conflict, especially when Brett goes off with a dashing young bullfighter.

The Sun Also Rises was the first Hemingway I ever read, way back in college, or maybe high school. I remember liking it, but I also remember feeling like I didn't get it, like there was something just beyond the page that I was missing. Reading it now, I think that my first impression was fairly dead on. There really is something subtle about The Sun Also Rises, even moreso when compared to the other Hemingways I've read, that seems inaccessible, just past the veil of the plainspoken language. You can see it emerge volcanically, when one of the characters--Mike, or Brett, or even Jake--blows up at poor pathetic Robert Cohn, the hanger-on that nobody really wants around, and who manages to puncture the smooth irony of their conversation and bring out the real anger and despair that's just beneath the surface.

I was just saying to Brent the other day that, to hear people on Twitter talk about Hemingway, I sometimes worry that we're at risk of losing or diminishing the real legacy of these novels. The objections you hear are rarely artistic ones, but moral ones: old Papa, nasty macho chauvinist. You know the ones. Without a doubt there's a ring of truth to them. There's a whiff of conservatism around the character of Brett, whose sexual emancipation seems to lead only to desperation. That conservatism is echoed by a sense that cultural revolution, like in Fitzgerald's novels, has not served the "Lost Generation" well, who spend their idle days in Pamplona pickling themselves and resenting each other. And Jake--and Hemingway--really do have an aficion, a passion, for the bloody, violent sport of bullfighting. You can call that machismo, if you like. And the antisemitism charges around the character of Cohn, an unwanted Jewish outsider called "k-ke" by Mike, certainly stick.

But I think the other side of each of those impressions is more powerful: First of all, it's not Brett's fault that men pounce on her like she's some kind of meal. There's a whiff of Daisy Buchanan in her, a woman who has learned to develop irony as armor to deal with the way that men attach themselves to her because of her physical attractiveness. (Though Brett is always in more control than Daisy, and never lets that irony curdle into put-on helplessness.) The bullfighting is violent, but the language that Hemingway uses to describe it rarely seems taken from the vocabulary of macho domination and power: the gifted matador Pedro Romero succeeds through self-control, precision, and even grace. Compare Pedro's skill to Robert, the boxer: when a jealous Robert socks Pedro in the face, Pedro defeats him just as he does the bull--not by hitting back with a powerful jab, but by outlasting the short-lived burst of masculine anger and violence--until Robert leaves the room crying. There's more to the antisemitism, maybe, but the way Mike, seizes on Robert's Jewishness to affirm his status as an unwanted outsider doesn't do Mike, a mean son of a bitch and a "bad drunk," any favors.

Frankly, Hemingway's best defense against the haters is just how talented he is. You could never reduce The Sun Also Rises to machismo because you can't reduce it to anything. The characters are simply too rich and too real, they contain multitudes, like real people do. I loved Brett's cleverness, and the way it conceals a deep vulnerability, and I really enjoyed the convivial wit of Bill Gorton, the final friend on the Pamplona trip. I even liked Robert Cohn, who's so persuasively pathetic. But the heart of the book is Jake Barnes. Unlike Mike, who lives on credit up and down the Mediterranean, or Brett, who lives off of what she's been able to get from the nobleman she's divorcing, and the other idle expatriates, Jake has a job. His sense that things must be "paid for" might be seen as the book's moral sense: the beauty of the bullfights are paid for by cruelty, and the freedom someone like Brett enjoys is paid for by loneliness. Hemingway thought it was a hopeful novel, and I think that's right; the lifestyle the friends enjoy really may be worth the price paid in money, labor, and loss. It really isn't The Great Gatsby, where you get fleeced and the world is a rotten bargain.

In the end, Brett runs off with the matador, but telegrams Jake at the last minute begging him to come to Madrid, where she's been abandoned: once again, the men in her life have wanted something she can't provide them. Except for Jake, that is--the only man, it seems, who Brett has wanted, and who hasn't been able to provide. Jake's impotency is a crushing blow to the Hemingway machismo theory, I think, because The Sun Also Rises doesn't really depict him as diminished by it. Rather, it enables him to be a friend to Brett when she needs it most, and novel's moral center. He pays dearly for the intimacy he enjoys, and the integrity he's developed, but perhaps that's worth it in the end, too.

Crewe Train by Rose Macaulay

In thinking of Arnold she forgot the Catholic Church, and slipped into an ecstasy of love. Oh, yes, she would be a Mohammedan if Arnold wished it. For Arnold she would be a Roman Catholic, learn to talk, read books, be intelligent, sociable, and like other people. She would eat off as many plates as he liked--hundreds and thousands of plates, and a fresh knife and fork with each of them. She would have meals cooked and laid in courses, and not snatch things out of the larder when hungry. She would, in brief, fully embrace the higher life, and, if to join Arnold's church were part of this, Arnold's church she would join. She would be ready to accept whatever the Church taught as belonging to the deposit of faith. She would learn, if necessary, to answer all those foolish questions in the Catechism. She would even undress modestly, thinking about death.

Denham Dobie is a loner. Living in the high mountains of Andorra, she prefers the solitude of nature to people, long walks to long talks. When her father dies, she's whisked to London by her aunt Evelyn, who ushers her into a world she can barely understand, full of dinners, gossip, and the restrictions of social convention. She falls for a publisher named Arnold Chapel, and they marry, but it doesn't take long for their incompatibility to be revealed: Arnold is a creature of London, attached to the pleasures of people and society, all the things which are, for Denham, sheer torture.

There's something of the "holy fool" about Denham: her ignorance of social convention makes her a powerful critic of it. She's constantly questioning why one "must" wear this instead of that, or have their servants "turn out" a different room each day, or eat six-course meals instead of eating simple food from the pantry whenever they are hungry. But Macaulay takes Denham's character farther than this, past social satire and into something more extreme and perhaps less palatable than a simple introvert. Except for Arnold, she really has no interest in people whatsoever. When she discovers a small cottage on the Cornish coast with a secret cave and passage to the sea, Arnold buys it, thinking that perhaps they will spend a holiday or two there, but Denham means to live there forever, away from London, away from all people, hidden in her cave.

Macaulay never quite suggests that Arnold and Denham's marriage is a mistake, though their incompatibility ultimately drives them to separate lives. What is more disturbing, actually, is that the love they share is sincere and ineradicable: "Love was the great taming emotion; perhaps the only taming emotion." Denham is right, of course, when she doesn't understand why people must change for others, when each can just go on living as they prefer. But of course, it doesn't work that way; love drives people into bargains they might otherwise never have made. It transforms, and not always in ways we would otherwise choose.

One of the more interesting satirical aspects of Crewe Train is the way it deals with writing and the publishing world. Both Arnold and Denham's uncle are publishers as well as writers. Arnold writes a book called Lone Jane, a piece of modernist nonsense that's clearly meant to be an attempt to get inside Denham's head. ("A woodpecker, that's a woodpecker, because the woodpecker would peck her, why did the lobster blush, because it saw the salad dressing, no, because the table had cedar legs; can't remember the questions, only the answers...") Denham, not recognizing the attempt, remarks that Jane "was a little queer in the head." Later, Denham's aunt Evelyn also tries to put Denham on paper, writing a salacious romance that drives the Arnold character into the arms of a character modeled on her own daughter Audrey. It's nonsense, but the story spreads, as Evelyn spread the story of the secret passage beneath the cottage, and in the same way ruins everything: the friendship between Arnold and Audrey, and very nearly the marriage of Arnold and Denham, for whom Evelyn has invented a Cornish fisherman lover. Macaulay seems to be suggesting here that literature is merely a kind of fancy gossip, and she may not be too far off there.

The Surrounded by D'Arcy McNickle

He knelt at his mother's head, thinking as he did so of the night in her tepee on Fourth of July night. The sparks flew up, expired, and he had wished that a person might find oblivion as easily. It was a different matter now. People grew into each other, became intertwined, and life was no mere matter of existence, no mere flash of time. It was time that made the difference. The time that was consumed in moving one's feet along the earth, in learning the smell of coming snow, in enduring hunger and fear and the loss of pride; all that made a difference. And a still greater difference was this entangling of lives. People grew together like creeping vines. The root of beginning was hard to find in the many that had come together and spread their foliage in one mass.

Archilde Leon is a "breed" in the classic archetype of Native fiction: half-Spanish, on the side of his ambitious but proud father, Max, and half-Flathead Salish on the side of his mother. He has been gone from the Flathead reservation in Montana a long time, playing his fiddle in Portland, and he expects his return will be a short one. The reservation he returns to is a tough place: his mother is no longer living in his father's house, his brother Louis wanted for horse thieving, his much-younger brothers Max and Narcisse are threatening to grow up the same way. The reservation has imposed idleness and dependence on the young men of the tribe, and bad behavior, it seems, follows. But Archilde is cautious and thoughtful; there is the hope, for a moment, that he might reconcile himself to his father and take over the extensive ranch. But such hopes are threatened when Louis is shot in the mountains by a game warden, and the game warden axed by their mother--a crime that will come back to haunt Archilde.

The Surrounded is a remarkably early book, by the standards of Native fiction in North America. Written in 1936 by D'Arcy McNickle, a Cree-Metis scholar who grew up among the Salish in Montana (there's an echo here of Momaday, who was Kiowa but wrote about the Pueblo communities where he grew up), The Surrounded captures a specific moment in the life of tribal relations in the U.S. The Indian wars are over, and the reservation era has been around for a generation or two. The marriage of Archilde's parents, it's intimated, has something to do with the Dawes Act that split communal land into allotments that could be sold--or stolen--that is, Max married Archilde's mother Catherine so that he might use her land. The arrangement, it seems, has gone sour: Catherine, a once devout Jesuit, has "gone back to the blanket" and returned to Salish customs and religion, for which she has been tossed out of the household.

The Surrounded depicts the Salish as having invited the arrival of the Jesuits in their country, foretold by visitors from the Iroquois to the east. The power of the Jesuits, totemized by the "two crossed sticks" of the cross, was seen by Catherine's generation as a force that might offer reprieve from the depredations of the U.S. Army and the violence, amplified by plentiful guns, of wars with the Blackfeet. When Catherine kills the game warden, Catholic confession fails to assuage her guilt; so instead she turns to the Salish chief and the ancient tradition of whipping. Catherine, in her disillusion and return to her traditions, is maybe the most interesting character in the novel, but I was also really taken by Archilde's father Max, whose practical attitude toward ranching and the land has curdled into a sour resentment not only of Catherine but all Indians, including his own children, who he regards as shiftless and untrustworthy.

There's an interesting element, too, in the story of Mike and Narcisse, who are sent on orders of the Indian Agent to the Residential School, where the unruly Mike becomes so terrified of the divine horrors threatened by the Jesuit instructors that he becomes traumatized and unable to ride a horse. It's a far cry, maybe, from the real horrors that we now know were perpetrated at residential schools, but the theme is clear: whatever the Salish hoped would happen when the Jesuits arrived has not come to pass, and things have gotten worse. Nevertheless, the novel takes many pains to show that some of the Jesuits are well-meaning and kind, like Father Grepilloux, Max's friend who promises to pull strings to offer Archilde training in the violin in Europe.

Archilde, the protagonist, is pulled in many directions: back to Portland, and a simple life of playing the fiddle and reading baseball scores, toward Europe and the violin, toward the land in front of him that his father, Max, wants him to cultivate. He is pulled, too, toward his mother, whom he feels like has never known or understood, and whose return to traditional ways kindles new possibilities in his mind. Archilde puts himself in danger to protect Catherine, but she is covered "by the whip" while he must still face the guilt of the warden's death and the threat of imprisonment long after Catherine dies. Like Tayo from Ceremony, like David from Night of the Living Rez, and countless other characters besides, Archilde's status as a "breed" epitomizes the feeling of being caught between worlds: white and Indian, Catholic and traditional, even, perhaps, past and future. His essential thoughtfulness separates him from his brother and the other idle young men of the reservation, but as McNickle shows, the weight of the contradictions threatens to destroy him anyway.

I liked The Surrounded; it has something of the style of McNickle's contemporary Willa Cather. There is a simplicity of language the is appropriate to the setting, and belies a depth of melancholy and despair. There's a sense of heavy-handedness to the plot--it seems more thematically necessary than organic that Archilde, on his brief stop at home, suffers the death of both of his parents--but perhaps it's true that Cather only conceals those things better. What the novel really does well is capture the sense of being surrounded--the crisis closing in, and avenues of hope closing. For Archilde, that feeling becomes, in the novel's final moments, sadly literal.

The Bone People by Keri Hulme

I know about me. I am the moon's sister, a tidal child stranded on land. The sea always in my ear, a surf of eternal discontent in my blood.

You're talking bullshit as usual.

Only what to do about the urchin's butter dreams? Or the man's evil shadows--the ghosts riding on his shoulders? The miasma of gloom that shrouded his lightning smile?

Kerewin Holmes is a recluse: part-white, part-Maori, and living by the sea in a round tower she built herself. She spends her days painting, playing guitar, and drinking. One day her solitude is broken by the sudden appearance of a white child in the Tower. He can't tell Kerewin why he came; he can't even speak. Eventually, she tracks down his foster father, a Maori man named Joe who explains that the boy, Simon, was recovered in a shipwreck. The experience has made Simon rebellious and temperamental: he cuts school, he fights, he steals Joe--whose wife and biological child have recently died--is all Simon has. Slowly, they become part of Kerewin's life, until she discovers that Joe has been viciously beating Simon for his bad behavior.

Maori writer Keri Hulme, who only finished this novel, depicts Kerewin as a clever eccentric, armed with a huge vocabulary and a chip on her shoulder. I was drawn to her at first, as to Joe and Simon, but they wore out their welcome for me. Which is to say I found Kerewin's cleverness annoying after a while. Hulme's style matches Kerewin's: long-winded, inflated, blowsy. Like Kerewin, it's one of a kind, and like Kerewin, it has its attractions but it sort of wears on you over 450 pages.

And I wasn't sure what to make of the way that The Bone People deals with Joe's abuse of Simon. On one hand, there's a seriousness and honesty to the novel's insistence that love and anger can be closer to one another than you'd think, and it refuses to do what you might expect from a novel in our era and paint Joe as fundamentally irredeemable, or flatten his anger into something that is inhuman or uninteresting. On the other hand, it's easy to bristle when Kerewin says to Joe something along the lines of, "At least you cared enough to show him when he was doing wrong." It's a lot for the novel to ask us to sympathize with the battered Simon--who is genuinely and permanently injured by Joe's climactic beating--and Joe, who loses his family when the boy is taken away from him. As much as the novel works to paint the scenario as complex, it's hard to believe that separating him from Joe isn't in the boy's best interests.

The part I thought was most interesting, actually, comes in the novel's final section, after Joe is released from a year in prison for his abuse of Simon: Joe travels to a remote beach to kill himself, but only manages to bust his arm. The old Maori man who discovers him and helps him heal tells Joe about a prophecy involving him, and a pair of figures who are obviously Kerewin and Simon; part of the prophecy is that Joe will come to take care of the man's ritual burial. The old man is described in the region as "the last of the cannibals," a traditional Maori whom the world has left behind, but he transfers onto Joe both the burden and the gift of keeping old ways alive. This section, with its many allusions to Maori religion and practices, finally seems rich and strange enough to be worthy of Hulme's unorthodox prose.