Nightland by Louis Owens (review)

Reviews 87 has a hyphenated identity that sets him or her apart from the rest of Americans: hence the title from a childhood joke, “What are you— Chinese, Japanese, or American knees?” After being divorced from his wife, Raymond Ding, a forty-year-old Chinese American working as a college affirmative action officer, meets Aurora, half Japanese and half Irish, at a party where they are the only two Asian Americans. Although Aurora moves in with Raymond in San Francisco and works as a photographer for a newspaper, their relationship lasts only two years because of Raymond’s insistence upon being 100 per­ cent Asian. In writing the novel, Wong dutifully bears the burden of rehabilitating the Chinese American image. But unlike other writers with heavy politi­ cal agendas, Wong is actually playful and at ease; in contrast, he was in his first novel, Homebase, a bit too intent on “correctly” representing early Chinese immigration history. Raymond is sufficiently human: sensi­ tive, whimsical, sardonic, sexually creative, and pathetically foolish. And as the narrative viewpoint swings back and forth between Raymond and Aurora, readers gain valuable psychological insights into the characters. Wong has shown other ethnic writers how to write politically sound fiction without losing the mainstream audience. SEIWOONG OH Rider University Nightland. By Louis Owens. (New York: Dutton, 1996. 217 pages, $22.00.) Louis Owens’s Nightland is a ghost story, a mystery, and a grail myth all tied into one small book. As with his previous novel, Sharpest Sight, Owens presents a ghost endangered by the “Anglo” blindness of his Native American protagonists. Unlike Sharpest Sight, however, in Nightland the very quality of the land is similarly endangered. In keeping with the tradition of grail myths, this has a wounded Fisher King, and a grail, and a powerful expectation for a ceremonial statement that can save the land from its Wasted condition. Traditionally, the Fisher King has been wounded in the groin, lan­ guishing unto death while waiting for the Grail Knight to ask the proper question. In Nightland the Fisher King is impaled on abroken juniper, and his ghost languishes, threatened with eternal death if the Grail Knights fail to meet his need: “He couldn’t shake the feeling that the dead man had known he was there and wanted something from him.” The grail in 88 Western American Literature this story is a golden grail (money) of British tradition. The British grail, however, is unholy—implying that the Holy Grail of the Anglos is wrong for Native Americans. And so begins the profound irony of this book: the question Owens presents (“Whom does this serve?”) and the manner in which he answers it. Readers of Nightland will find far more wealth than just an enjoyable story. Owens thoroughly understands the history of Native American lit­ erature—a history that consistently asks the question, “Is there a place for Native American tradition in contemporary America?” In the past, answers to this question have tended to be accidental, implicit in the evo­ lution of Native American literature; Owens seems to make it the focus of his novel (his grail question). A Native American literature class would be incomplete without the likes of McNickle, Momaday, Vizenor, Silko, Erdrich, and Welch. It seems to me that a complete Native American literature class will also contain two of Owens’s most recent books: Other Destinies (his scholar­ ly essays) and either Sharpest Sight or Nightland. My choice is all three. DAVID E. HAILEY, JR. Utah State University The Journal of Antonio Montoya. By Rick Collignon. (Denver: MacMurray & Beck, 1996. 217 pages, $17.00.) In this short novel of northern New Mexico, struggling artist Ramona Montoya returns to her girlhood village of Guadalupe after her grandfa­ ther dies and leaves her the family adobe home. In the next dozen or so years Ramona captures Guadalupe in her paintings; yet she irritates the townspeople by refusing to be social—that is, make small talk at Felix’s Cafe and attend her fair share of the town’s seemingly countless funerals. Ramona’s self-imposed isolation abruptly ends with the death of her younger brother José and his wife Loretta in a car wreck. After the...