Trials and Trails

Page 26 American Book Review Moraru continued from previous page public welfare. George Burghess (“bourgeois”?) is charged, naturally, with constructing the appearance of the opposite:Abaddon as a company “who cares” and does business within the law and with a sense of communal responsibility. Before long, though, the façade cracks, if not for the company, then for Burghess, who is going through a serious inner crisis as his amoral handling of various PR issues clashes with how he actually feels about things. There is, one more time, a Biblical tone to the critique of the amoral, if not the blatantly immoral, “businesslike” approach to the world and its people. The title of the novel quotes the phrase in Kings where Solomon refers to God’s sanctuary. Temple, tabernacle, or space of worship, the “exalted house” casts light on a deeper meaning of home, shelter, dwelling, and place in general. Profoundly tied into the notion of presence—into presence itself as divine notion rather than the presence of the divinity itself— place is in Maltby’s domestic imaginary inseparable from human occupancy. Money, considerations of capital overall, we gather, tend to write this presence off and thus de-sacralize space, “re-zone” it as real estate, network of financial flows, productionconsumption exchanges, and lucrative set up—the kind of “non-places” Marc Augé surveys in his analysis of “supermodernity.” What the writer and some of his characters want us to think about, instead, is space—whether outside or inside—as dwelling. A religious and metaphysical concept, space is no longer defined exclusively or primarily by monetary transactions and value, and ownership per se; space is in An Exalted House, much like the Old Testament’s sacred tabernacle and Temple, synonym to a sort of absolute access—here, for and to others, and, we understand, through them, beyond. What I admire, then, in Maltby’s book is not only the refreshingly confident way of using the tools in the novelist’s traditional repertoire but also the rich texture of a writing that intertwines artfully realist presentation, irony, onomastic puns redolent of Don DeLillo’s The Names (1982) and Ratner’s Star (1976), and allusivesymbolic language. Christian Moraru is a professor of American literature and critical theory at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. His latest books are Memorious Discourse: Reprise and Representation in Postmodernism (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005) and Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning (SUNY Press, 2001). TrialS and TrailS Laura Grace Godwin three Plays: the indolent Boys, Children of the sun, and the moon in two windows N. Scott Momaday University of Oklahoma Press http://www.oupress.com 224 pages; cloth, $24.95 A scene in N. Scott Momaday’s The Moon in Two Windows sees a Lakota boy staring out the window of the train taking him from his homeland to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Captain Pratt, the driving force behind the institution, asks for help in interpreting the boy’s silence. Etahdleuh , Pratt’s Kiowa assistant, says the young warrior is “marking a trail. He will remember landmarks, and he will know how to return.” The exchange articulates a key concept in Momaday’s Three Plays, for each marks the trails and trials of the author’s Kiowa people as the nineteenth century became the twentieth and forced acculturation irrevocably altered the indigenous cultures of America. Momaday’s Three Plays offers a modern incarnation of the indigenous oral tradition to which the author refers in his preface. All are episodic stories framed by a narrator who shapes audience response and weaves narrative strands together. Mother Goodeye introduces The Indolent Boys, a study of the ramifications of the deaths of three boys during an 1891 blizzard.As the teachers justify the beating that led to the boys’ departure from the Kiowa Boarding School, the NativeAmerican pupils and staff struggle to express their grief for the loss of their brothers and the suppression of their culture. Children of the Sun is a “father-daughter collaboration” in which Momaday prefaces his version of the ancient Kiowa creation epic with an original tale by his daughter. Grandmother Spider presents the story and ties...