The New Native American Novel: Works in Progress ed. by Mary Dougherty Bartlett (review)

74 Western American Literature characteristics of this “group style” during periods when Norris was not a member of the staff (he was an employee from 1896-1898), he was able to determine that many writings previously attributed to Norris were, in truth, written by other Wave staffers. The depth of McElrath’s research and analysis are astounding and are painstakingly detailed in the text. In short, these new insights into Norris’s formative period are invaluable for those who are serious Norriseans. BARBARANNE SCHUYLER University of Arizona The New Native American Novel: Works in Progress. Edited by Mary Dough­ erty Bartlett. (Albuquerque: UniversityofNew Mexico Press, 1986. 132 pages, $22.50/$9.95.) Major presses have finally discovered Indians, and well-publicized works by Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris have joined classics by Momaday and Welch in the microscopic Native American sections of chain bookstores. Still, to read most Native American work, you must order from small presses that have published it for years. The New Native American Novel is an excellent sample by nine writers. N. Scott Momaday’s contribution does not much resemble his betterknown work. Perhaps he’s casting off the limitations of being an Indian writer, and simply writing to please himself. Glen Martin is an Osage who free-lances articles to outdoor magazines. His excerpt from The Shooter features a Shoshone firefighter. During forest fires, hot air currents ignite animals far ahead of actual flames. The animals run wildly across the lines, igniting new fires as they die. The Shoshone’s bizarre specialty is shooting them before they can cross the line, and the story centers on whether or not he will shoot the only grizzly he’s ever seen in California. “Making Do,” from The Grace of Wooden Birds by Linda Hogan, a Chickasaw, introduces us to Roberta James. Roberta’s life, featuring several illegitimate children and a succession of lovers, becomes a heart-rending saga of Everywoman as the familiar people of her world leave her to journey into death. Hogan, like many of the Native American writers, doesn’t play by the fiction-writing rules that bind most white writers, but her story works anyway —reminding us that these writers are correctly changing fiction to fit their own speech and culture patterns. Other writers well know'n to readers who’ve tracked down presses special­ izing in Native American work—Paula Gunn Allen, Louis Owens, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, and Gerald Vizenor, as well as Erdrich and Dorris—contribute Reviews 75 previously unpublished segments of books you’ll want to read. Dorris’s is especially intriguing because in this version, his main character from A Yellow Raft in Blue Water is male. All of these writers will reach inside you, twist you, tease you with a kind of deadpan humor you may find surprising. All of them deserve more readers. Don’t wait for the major presses to “discover” them; find them—and the dozens of other Native American writers—yourself. LINDA M. HASSELSTROM Hermosa, South Dakota Pilgrim in the Sun. By C. L. Sonnichsen. (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1988. 272 pages, $25.00/$15.00.) Although this new collection of previously published essays devotes rela­ tively few pages to fiction, the rationale is the same as for Hopalong to Hud: Thoughts on Western Fiction (1978) :the study of popular fiction and folklore reveals “where we the people have been, where we are, and where we are going.” To disagree with this premise is to lose the essential Sonnichsen, although he can still be read with interest and pleasure. The essays cover a variety of southwestern (mostly Texas) local historical matters, colorful people such as Roy Bean and the controversial Tom Jeffords, and, near the end of the book, three chapters centering on popular fiction that embodies humor or treats the Apache in general and Geronimo in particular. Sonnichsen writes not as a literary critic or as a “library historian” but as a “ruminant grassroots historian.” The appellation is of special concern to him; his defense of it constitutes the original material in Pilgrim. The ruminative process—Sonnichsen’smethod of making a book—begins with a talk to audiences that respond with criticism...