Good Thunder by John Solensten (review)

Reviews 235 The Vision is Fulfilled. By Kay L. McDonald. (New York: Walker, 1983. 356 pages, $14.95.) The vision in this novel is hackneyed and limp: the book summarizes scenes from every Oregon Trial novel ever written, elaborating only on the sexual writhings of the mountain-man-turned-trail-guide hero. He lusts for 1) his fragile Anglo wife, and 2) his dusky Indian maiden. His manly lust is not fulfilled until the last page — by which time the wise reader will have turned to A. B. Guthrie. JUNE O. UNDERWOOD Emporia State University Good Thunder. ByJohn Solensten. (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1983. $12.95.) Good Thunder isn’t just another no-hope Indian novel, wherein the young halfbreed tries — but fails — again, defeated by alcoholism or white prejudice. Solensten has given us a book that pulls no punches, but holds out hope. It’s a difficult novel to begin, because he has set himself a hard task: following a character from squalid birth to near-adulthood. Necessarily, this slows the early action, as he sets scenes and establishes characters. But for the reader who sticks with it, who reads calmly through the birth of a baby in the back of a bar filled with flat characters labeled White Prejudice, the journey is worth the effort. Once the author follows Charles Good Thunder through his early years and into high school, the novel has a solid grip on the reader. Obviously, the author has done his background work well. He has seen the fresh hope of white teachers in schools with primarily Indian students turn to hopelessness. He has seen the unique struggles of students who actually want to learn, as they face not only the difficulties of the learning process, but the scorn of classmates who charge them with “selling out” to the white community. He’s seen the pride that lives inside such students. In some, it turns to violence and hatred; in others it is buried as they try to “become” white. Solensten is skilled at evoking today’s West, with its multiple tensions: a boy’s struggles to become a man in the middle of a reservation society tense with conflict between Native Americans, whites and mixed bloods. The very foundations, the values, of these separate elements of society come into focus. But it is, finally, the characters upon which a novel must stand or fall, and Solensten’s characters in Good Thunder are a most successful, intriguing lot. None of them are especially good in a moral sense, and thus they are believable. They’re all strugglingwith their livesin their own way, trying to do something that’simportant, even if they’re not always sure what it is. Charlie has been taken in at birth by an Indian woman and her husband after the death of his real mother. But the husband leaves after conflicts over 236 Western American Literature the “adopted” boy, for reasons which are not immediately clear. The boy, knowing neither his real mother nor father, begins a desperate search for the man who left his mother. His foster mother, Nancy, is a figure familiar to anyone who has lived around reservations: a woman who makes mistakes, but keeps her family as strong as possible. When she has had enough, she retreats into the powerful matriarchal history of her people, and refuses to take any more abuse, from anyone. Magnuson, the enigmatic white man whom Charlie first hates and finally joins in a strange alliance, grows more in the course of the novel than any other character, except Charlie, seeming to embody what is possible for white society. Nancy and Magnuson, with Charlie, dominate the book. Charlie’s search ends, not really with success, but with something more than he expected to find, and without stumbling into cliche. LINDA M. HASSELSTROM Hermosa, South Dakota M aking Certain It Goes On. By Richard Hugo. (New York: Norton, 1984. 456 pages, $25.00.) Richard Hugo’s M aking Certain It Goes On is one “last good kiss,” his last book of poetry. Dick died suddenly in October of 1982, of a fungal pneumonia after a second surgery for cancer. He...