Books: October 9, 1996
NATIVE AMERICANS ENCOUNTER A HARSH WORLD
Three generations on an Indian reservation battle winter, war, suffering, and prejudice
Little
David Treuer '92
Graywolf Press, $22.95
David Treuer's first novel, Little, is the story of three generations of Native Americans living on a cold, barren Minnesota reservation they call Poverty. They live through bone-numbing winters, tornadoes in summer, birth, death, war, prejudice-even slavery. Each family's story is somehow linked with the others, and as often as characters leave the reservation community they are drawn back into it.
The book's most compelling characters are an old woman named Jeanette and a set of identical twins, Duke and Ellis. Treuer devotes a long chapter to Jeanette, but her story is so moving she deserves a book of her own. Born in 1908 and raised largely by her mother after her father has left to work in the lumber camps, Jeanette and her mother tough it out on the reservation for several years. But later, frozen, destitute, and defeated by hunger, they leave the reservation for town when she is eight. As a teenager, she returns to Poverty, has a baby who dies, and eventually leaves again when she is forced into servitude.
Jeanette's life is intermingled with those of Duke and Ellis, who are given their American names by immigrant loggers. By the age of 10, the two boys have already spent years in logging camps and are managing to survive on their own. Jeanette meets them in the early 1900s, when she finds them living in the basement of the town church. She brings the hungry boys a potato one day, and their friendship is sealed. When the twins are much older, they move to the reservation and live in their car, an old Catalina. In a series of heartbreaking events, among which is their killing of an infant and a man, they are forced to leave Poverty, and Jeanette, for 30 years. In the ensuing time, Treuer introduces us to a group of characters bound together by genealogy, suffering, and circumstance.
Treuer has separated the novel into chapters that describe characters and places in turn, skillfully changing voices to fit each chapter's subject. Incidents in history are seen through the eyes of several characters, and each person's perspective reveals another part of the story. At its best, the writing is sparse, poetic, and moving. But in lesser moments, Treuer's writing is enigmatic and inadequate, leaving us with characters and events crying out for further development. With a story as sweeping as this one, spanning almost the entire 20th century and involving 10 main characters and a host of minor ones, more information is needed at times to fill some of the holes Treuer's narrative creates. For example, Little is named for a boy by the same name, who has claws for hands and who has never spoken save for the word "you." The author tries to convince us that Little is the mysterious key to some larger truth, but the character just isn't convincing, and it's never clear why the boy is there.
In a chapter titled "Iowa 1966" we are introduced to a young boy named Paul, who will eventually move to Poverty to become the church priest. The chapter starts with three pages describing the feelings of Paul's farmhouse with lines like "The house knew it didn't belong there, that it was truly alone and had been constructed and then abandoned like a child left on a busy street corner."
But those weaker passages are few, and Treuer's writing is usually convincing and poignant. In the same chapter he masterfully describes Paul as an unwilling participant in the routine slaughter of a cow for dinner. In two chilling sentences we can feel the boy's dread of this event: "The only forewarning he received occurred five minutes before each slaughter when his father called out to him. 'Paul, get the pan.' "
Treuer leaves us with lasting impressions, and graphic details are his forte. He describes a dying deer whose neck has been slit: " . . . blood rivered from the doe's neck and bubbled from underneath her ribs . . . " And he writes about Duke and Ellis's Catalina in the winter which "was frosted, all of the windows caked outside in webs of ice, the inside a smooth gray of frozen breath."
We are given a fictional history lesson in Little, through tales of struggling families on an unforgiving Indian reservation in the middle of a white world. Treuer, who is an Ojibwe Indian, still lives on the Minnesota reservation where he grew up. He has written an impressive first novel and allowed his readers into a brutal and mysterious world he knows intimately.
-Eilene Zimmerman
Eilene Zimmerman is a writer and editor living in Concord, New Hampshire.
HOW TO RAISE KIDS WITH GRACE
How to Raise Kids with Grace
Elbows Off the Table, Napkin in the Lap,
No Video Games During Dinner
Carol McD. Wallace '77
St. Martin's Press, 11.95 paper
We'll never know if, as an undergraduate, Carol McD. Wallace '77 could have written a book about how to behave at step sings, house parties, or teas thrown by academic deans. However, she clearly knows a lot about bringing up youngsters in the 1990s. In Elbows Off the Table, Napkin in the Lap, No Video Games During Dinner, she helps parents teach their little savages rules of behavior that will at least guarantee they will act appropriately in everyday situations, if not give them entrée to the Court of St. James.
For those who know children who swallow their food whole or leave the table at whim, who refuse to say hello even when you've driven days to visit, or who don't write thank-you notes for the annual stream of Valentine's Day, birthday, Halloween, Hanukkah, Christmas, or Kwanzaa presents, Wallace offers practical advice in an efficient and helpful format.
Elbows Off the Table is organized into age-specific sections. The first covers what parents should expect of a three-to-five-year-old, the second is for the six-to-nine-year old, and the last covers the 10-to-12-year-old. After that, if you haven't done the basics, look out, world. Within each section are chapters covering such topics as party manners, good grooming, and telephone manners.
In an especial-ly reassuring final section, Wallace talks to parents. She is sympathetic to today's overburdened mothers and fathers and reinforces what we all know to be true: that manners count for a lot. She encourages us to gird ourselves for that friendly fray whose outcome-a polite child-is more than worth the effort.
-Lolly O'Brien
A JOURNEY INTO POLICE CORRUPTION, HEROIN, ROMANCE, MURDER, AND CHINA
Grand Jury
Philip Friedman '65
Donald I. Fine Books, $24.95
This engrossing courtroom drama is a page turner, and well worth the risk of a repetitive-stress injury. Besides, just because I started feeling sharp, stabbing pains shooting up my right wrist at about page 450 doesn't mean that you will, especially if you read in an ergonomically correct position, which I completely forgot to do, as I was so caught up in the story. So what if my arm's now in a brace? I had to get to page 595, and as quickly as possible, because there was no way I could figure the situation out by myself.
Thank goodness I had David Clark and Susan Linwood to guide me. These two lovelorn grand-jury-members-turned-amateur-sleuths were a pleasure to be with on this journey into police corruption, intrigue, heroin, romance, China, murder, bribery, treachery, and the inner workings of a grand-jury deliberation.
Philip Friedman '65, author of the bestsellers Inadmissible Evidence (Donald I. Fine Books, 1992) and Reasonable Doubt (Donald I. Fine Books, 1990), seamlessly incorporates huge chunks of information into the narrative without slowing down the story line, an impressive feat. Grand Jury is a course in Chinese history, a course in the U.S. legal system, and a story, all in one.
Among the more interesting facts I learned was that it's common to find traces of cocaine on our currency, in particular on bills between $10 and $50. That's where the story starts-with drugs and money. Specifically, with heroin and more than $400,000 found in the apartment of Martin and Meiling Eng, an elderly couple who are well respected in New York City's Chinatown.
David and Susan are grand jurors in the drug-conspiracy case against the Engs. Susan, who is Chinese American, has a feeling that the Engs aren't guilty, in part because she unconsciously views them as parental figures. She questions many of the details of the case, using David as a sounding board. Gradually, they begin to investigate the case, trying to get at the truth. But truth is hard to come by. Trouble, however, is everywhere, and David and Susan get into plenty of it.
The serious problems start when they go to Hong Kong and to mainland China-Susan in pursuit of truth, and David, basically, in pursuit of Susan. In their travels, they learn a toast: "Confusion to our enemies." But as they journey, they become more and more confused themselves and unable to distinguish between friends and enemies. While still convinced that the Engs are not guilty of drug-related charges, they find signs that the Engs are not only powerful but may be involved in other types of illegal activities. Then people start getting killed.
In a parallel plot, the prosecutor, Dan Mahoney, is also investigating the charges against the Engs, because he has questions of his own regarding the case. His inquiries lead to findings of police corruption and doubts concerning the ethics of his immediate superior.
In addition, he realizes that David and Susan are somehow involved, and he pursues them. By this time, the federal government has made its interest in the Engs' case known, but no one's sure why. Everyone wants the truth for their own reasons, and no one's particularly interested in cooperating with anyone else.
Eventually, of course, it all comes together. Friedman does a remarkable job of maintaining a high level of suspense throughout the twists and turns of this information-heavy, labyrinthine tale. "The truth must be honored," Susan is told when she's in Hong Kong. "I know it is painful. I hope and believe this kind of pain is good for the spirit." Friedman also believes that truth is the way to go, excruciating as the journey may be.
-Andrea Gollin '88
Andrea Gollin is an editor at SmartKid magazine in Miami, Florida.
BOOKS RECEIVED
The Kensington Rune-Stone: Authentic and Important
Robert A. Hall, Jr. '31
Jupiter Press, 360 MacLaren Lane, Lake Bluff, IL 60044. $30 cloth, $20 paper
Down from Bureaucracy:
The Ambiguity of Privatization
and Empowerment
Joel F. Handler '54
Princeton University Press, $29.95
The Business of
Petroleum Exploration
Richard Steinmetz '54, ed.
American Association of Petroleum Geologists, P.O. Box 979, Tulsa, OK 74101. $25
Olivier de Clisson and
Political Society in France
Under Charles V and Charles VI
John Bell Henneman '57
University of Pennsylvania Press, $54.95
An Architectural Life:
Memoirs & Memories of
Charles W. Moore [*57]
Kevin P. Keim
Bulfinch Press, $50
The Death of Discourse
David M. Skover '74 and
Ronald K. L. Collins
Westview Press,
$49.95 cloth, $16.95 paper