Bone Game by Louis Owens (review)

222 WesternAmerican Literature you begging for the respite ofa summer evening, it ishard to deny the holiness ofwater. “Desolation lives in the continent’s dry heart. . Meloywrites. “. . . The River is its artery, my bloodstream, the capillaried branches of a riparian cottonwood tree, the splintered lightning ofsummer thunderstorms, the veins on the backs ofmyhands, full and blue asI hold the oars.” In asense ofplace narrative thatcombinesWendell Berry’sconviction,with naturalistAnn Zwinger’seyefor detail, and Chip Rawlins’searthy poetics, Ellen Meloy grabs the oars and rows us into the heart ofa river nomad’sview of the world. Like other biophiliacs who have found their niche running the rivers of the Colorado Plateau, Meloysavors the “aromatic river ofair curling above the water itself, a cool stony turbulent smell, the smell ofrapids.”In the windblown grit ofDesolation Canyon, she tastes the “fine-lined rock strata that resemble a gargantuan phyllodough pastryrobbed ofitsfilling.”Food metaphors through­ out the narrative will have river-running aficionados greasing up their Dutch-ovens and longing for the smell ofcedar smoke. Caution: long term exposure to the sensual delights ofriver travel maylead to a permanently altered sense of reality. Ellen Meloy’sdelightfully hallucino­ genic sense ofhumor suggests that she mayhave alreadycrossed that eddy line. But she keeps both oars in the water—telling tales of squawfish, Anasazi and Fremontghosts,John WesleyPowell, and desertbighorns—asshe rowsus down the river. She takes us beyond the holy lands of Desolation to witness the profane beauty of “Lake Foul”with Ken “Seldom Seen”Sleightand to seek out traces of nature believed to be hidden under the neon facades of Las Vegas. Thankfully, Ellen Meloy’sgraceful meanders into some of the troubling issues related to water use in the West always lead us back to the solace ofthe river. PETERANDERSON SaltLake City, Utah BoneGame. ByLouis Owens. (Norman: UniversityofOklahoma Press, 1994. 243 pages, $19.95.) In his third novel Louis Owens, the Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish Steinbeck and Indian literary scholar and writer offiction, again offers a murder mystery—of sorts. This qualification isin no wayintended to be a slight; to the contrary, it is meant as a compliment, since Owens obviouslyintends the book to be so much more than formula fiction, however entertaining the more standard mysteries can be. In part, Bone Game explores what Owens himself, in his Other Destinies: UnderstandingtheAmericanIndianNovel, has noted iscentral to NativeAmerican novels: the quest for the meaning of Indian or biracial identity. As before, he also takes on intellectual and metaphysical themes, ranging here from his gentle but firm satirizing of promiscuously relativistic, uncentered contempo­ Reviews 223 rary college and university campuses to steadfastly developing his antithesis (and antidote?), an eclectic and pluralistic but principled Native American cosmography. And he does so in a fashion for which he himself once praised James Welch’s Fools Crow, one “offering no apologies or explanations for a magical interweaving of natural and supernatural.” Along the way, Owens creates an overall interesting and readable novel. Some of the book’s characters are fascinating repeat performers readers of Owens will recognize, and most of the characters are humanized and well conceived. Though the murder mysteryitselfisnotverywellveiled—despite an intended surprise plot twist, many readers likelywill figure out early on who is doing the killing—the other mysteries the novel dealswith are denserand more compelling. And while the story lags somewhat in the middle and is arguably overwrought and perhaps thematically a bit confused at the end, it possesses a power beyond mere logic, maybe in part because ofthis veryunevenness. One of the strongest and most enjoyable traits of the novel is its “Indian” humor, one of the manyvehicles Owens uses to allow his characters to reclaim their Indianness. From the cross-dressing Navajo trickster-figure, the heyoka Alex Yazzie, to an insidejab at TonyHillerman—“He isNavajo, isn’t he?”main character Cole McMurtrain knowingly asks Alex—Owens keeps the reader laughing. On the whole, then, Louis Owens deserves the attention he is currently receiving as he revitalizes murder mysteries and adds to the growing body of impressive fiction by Native American authors. Like them—the Welches, Erdrichs, Silkos, Momadays, and so forth—he iswriting within certain Ameri­ can literary traditions while simultaneously adding new dimensions to...