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Going Native
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20259 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
1,390 Words |
| Author
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Charles R. Larson
Charles R. Larson is an internationally known authority on
Third World literature. He is the author of The Emergence of
African Fiction, The Novel in the Third World, and American
Indian Fiction. His novel The Insect Colony is set in West
Africa during the Nigerian civil war. He has edited several
anthologies of international writing and served as general
editor of Collier Books' African/American Library. He teaches
literature at American University in Washington, D.C. |
INDIAN AFFAIRS
Larry Woiwode
New York: Atheneum, 1992
320 pp., $19.95
An artist friend, whose judgment I value, says that no matter where you turn these days, American Indian motifs keep showing up. She cites as her examples the backgrounds in advertisements in catalogs or on TV, design motifs in clothing, and the increasing trendiness of southwestern Indian jewelry and art. Writing about Native Americans is "in," she tells me. Other ethnic groups are out.
I don't know whether I'd go quite so far as my friend's pronouncement, but there is no question about the visibility of American Indian writers and Indian themes in American fiction of the last decade or two. Works by N. Scott Momaday, Hyemeyohsts Storm, Leslie Silko, James Welch, and Louise Erdrich attest to the belated interest that American readers have finally developed for our first Americans. I would like to think that the early contributions of these writers are lasting and not part of a passing stage, though sometimes I feel that the writers themselves have been compelled to churn out works that enhance their publishers' balance sheets more than their own literary reputations.
Larry Woiwode's Indian Affairs offers a curious variation on this subject--curious because this gifted writer's earlier literary career largely avoided the ethnicity of his newest novel. Indian Affairs is, in fact, a puzzling sequel to the author's memorable first novel, What I'm Going to Do, I Think (1969). Where that novel concentrated on nuances of character interaction and the slow, agonizing growth to maturity of the main character, Indian Affairs makes a frontal attack on Chris Strohe's desire to understand and articulate his Indian heritage intellectually. The implication is what Woiwode himself has undergone a similar attempt to determine what it means to be a contemporary American with a touch of Indian blood.
Basic Necessities
Seven years after the closure of the earlier novel, Indian Affairs follows Chris and his wife, Ellen, into the wilds of upstate Michigan, where the two of them have retreated, ostensibly so that Chris can write the dissertation for his Ph.D. in American literature. The intent is tow inter in the isolated cabin where they honeymooned together years earlier, and where presumably there will be few distractions to the
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