From the Glittering World: A Navajo Story by Irvin Morris (review)

B o o k R e v ie w s From the Qlittering World: A Navajo Story. By Irvin Morris. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. 260 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Paul Hadella Southern Oregon University Navajo myth tells of a series of major transformations, four in all, that led to the Dine, the People, finally emerging into this, the fifth, or “glit­ tering,” world. In From the Glittering World, his first book, Irvin Morris recalls these phases of development by dividing the book into four parts, which in turn symbolize the writer’s evolving consciousness. He begins from the cornerstone, a retelling of the Navajo creation myth, then brings to life the tribe’s tragic Long Walk and its imprisonment during the 1860s at Bosque Redondo (Part One), follows with twenty-four chapters of auto­ biography (Parts Two and Three), and concludes with a set of short stories (Part Four). Throughout the book, Morris’s command of a crisp, unpretentious prose is most impressive. In the autobiographical chapters, Morris avoids a strict running narrative and instead tells the story of his life, his own personal myth, through vividly realized scenes, sketches, and anecdotes that speak for the whole. His style is so low-key that he hardly seems to be trying to be “artistic,” yet the cumulative effect of these pieces is quite powerful. For Morris’s beautiful descriptions of the remote N avajo reser­ vation this book deserves to be on the shelf of anyone tracking the liter­ ature of the Southwest. But From the Glittering World is anything but a sentimental romance. Morris’s series of dead-end jobs in Los Angeles and his wasted days and nights in the notorious alleyways and protective cus­ tody cell of Gallup, New M exico, darken the picture. As an account of the fate that overcomes many Native Americans who leave the reserva­ tion, these chapters need to be told. As for the six short stories that complete the book, my favorite (because of its hearty humor) is “Meat and the M an,” about a strange but genial white visitor to Navajoland who, with his canine sidekick, noses his way into the everyday life of a Navajo family. Unbeknown to the family— and to the reader until nearly the end— the stranger is an anthropologist who is taking advantage of N avajo hospitality for his own career gain. Morris keeps the tone of the story comic, yet beneath the surface he is air­ ing the Native disgust for so-called culture vultures. With Leslie Silko’s Storyteller and Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, Native Americans have written some of the most important multigenre works of the last twenty years. Like these books, From the Glittering World uses autobiography as both a point of departure and a point of return for the writer’s growing sense of his place within a Native W A L 3 3 (1 ) SPRING 1 9 9 8 cultural tradition of storytelling. Moreover, it firmly establishes Irvin Morris as a talent to watch. The Sharp Teeth of Love. By Doris Betts. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 336 pages, $24-00. Reviewed by Charlotte M. Wright University of North Texas Press I expected to like The Sharp Teeth of Love because I loved Betts’s ear­ lier novel Heading West, in which librarian Nancy Finch from North Carolina is kidnapped and forced to drive into the West. She manages to escape her abductor only by a risky descent on foot trails into the Grand Canyon, a journey that symbolizes how useless are humanity’s “civilized” ways when pitted against the potentially fatal wildness of nature. The central character in The Sharp Teeth of Love, Luna Stone, is also a southern woman on a westward journey, and to Luna, likewise, the West is a dangerous place: “It’s hopeless. Too big. Just hopeless.” . . . She was still thinking of pioneer women shielding their eyes to stare at those impassable mountains, already in their minds giving up the rosebush, the piano, the box of books. She wondered if danger had proved to be an aphrodisiac. Maybe for the men. (28) Perhaps if Betts had remained...