The Bingo Palace by Louise Erdrich (review)

304 Western American Literature own. We keep expecting to discover a male Emily Dickinson—or at least a Robert Service—scribbling in his notebook around the campfire after the chores of a thirtythree -mile march across the Wyoming or Montana or Dakota plains are done. Let it be said that there are a few creditable poems (especially the dramatic monologues) in his collection; and we do notice him improving as he continues to write. And many of the errors in his verse may be attributed to the difficulty of transcribing accurately the old, first-draft handwriting. But unfortunately as we read the poems, we find that George is not much of a poet in spite of his valiant efforts to use poems to express his pain and loneliness and cultivate a civilized consciousness and intellectual life even on the daily grind of frontier soldiering in the 1870s. The book then becomes most valuable as the chronicle of the struggle of a lonely, wounded individual to live “an honest upright life before God and man”—or rather before God and the women of his time, including his mother. This is a more worthy aim than even the production of great poems, and it sustained him through the travail of his Army service and the chronic pain of a head wound suffered in a terrible trainwreckatage twenty, even before hejoined theArmy. As such it isa worthwhile book, and verywell illustrated. Susan Reneau has done a commendable job of scholarship and production in bringing all this to the reader. STARRJENKINS San Luis Obispo, California TheBingoPalace. ByLouise Erdrich. (New York: HarperCollins, 1994. 274 pages, $23.00.) In Joy Harjo’s poem “Anchorage,” the Creek poet’s narrator ruminates on “the fantastic and terrible storyof all ofour survival/ those who were never meant to survive.” These words, descriptive of Native American cultural survival in general through the twentieth century, also apply to the characters of TheBingoPalace, the fourth in aseries of novels set on and about a fictional Chippewa, or Ojibwa, reservation in North Dakota. The names Morrissey, Kashpaw, Nanapush, Pillager, and Lamartine will be familiar to readers of LoveMedicine, TheBeetQueen, and Tracks, the earlier novels in the sequence. As in these novels, in TheBingoPalaceErdrich swaps narrative voices to create amultidimen­ sional view of contemporary reservation life. Lyrical and luminescent, comic and poi­ gnant, TheBingoPalaceisan exuberant fiction. Throughout, Erdrich’sprose isadmirably poised, while her use of imagery is often stunning. At the center of the novel lies Lipsha Morrissey, illegitimate son of parents June Kashpaw, whose death and symbolic homecoming frame Love Medicine, and Gerry Nanapush, the repeatedly imprisoned and escaping trickster. Called back to the reserva­ tion by his grandmother, Lulu Lamartine, Lipsha proceeds to fall in love (with Shawnee Ray Toose), find ajob (cleaning and bartending in the bingo hall), gain a measure of prosperity (through winning at bingo), and engage in a complex negotiation with his personal and cultural histories. Opportunistic, vulnerable, self-involved, and sometimes a winner, Lipsha isacomplex character. Initiallyhe isdisparaged as one whose potential as ahealer and well-educated tribal son has been squandered: “His touch wasstrong, but he shorted it out.”By the end of the novel, though, he appears to have reached a tentative resolution with his past and his place within the community. Reviews 305 On Indians, Lipsha declares, “We’re born heavier, but scales don’tweigh us. From day one, we’re loaded down. History, personal politics, tangled bloodlines. We’re too preoccupied with setting things rightaround us to get rich.”On bingo, he states, “It’snot completely one way or another, traditional against the bingo. You have to stay alive to keep your tradition alive and working.”In Erdrich’sfiction the personal and the political are completely intertwined. Gaining a measure of autonomy over both one’s individual life and the collective livelihood of the Native community means entreating with chance, fate, luck (both good and bad), and the often bewildering cruelty of the past. MARTIN PADGET University ofCalifornia, SanDiego TheJune Rise: TheApocryphalLetters offoseph AntoineJanis. By William Tremblay. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1994. 233 pages, $19.95.) Froman incident in the sketchy biography ofafrontiersman namedjoseph Antoine Janis (b. 1824), William Tremblay has written...