American by Blood by Andrew Huebner (review)

BOOK REVIEW S 1 9 9 American by Blood. By Andrew Huebner. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. 245 pages, $23.00. Reviewed by Paulette Callen New York, New York American by Blood is the fictional account of three men who arrive a day late to join up with Custer and are the first non-Indians to discover the bod­ ies of the defeated Seventh Cavalry. Thereafter, they follow the remnants of Indian bands, both Sioux and Nez Percé, until the Indians are either killed or consigned to a reservation. This story— how ordinary men, as soldiers, do terrible things— is espe­ cially resonant for post-Vietnam America, reminding us that Vietnam was not the first time the United States involved itself in a morally bankrupt conflict. The story is well worth telling. Unfortunately, the author lacks the skill to do it justice. Huebner’s prose ranges from unwieldy to incomprehensible. The absence of quotation marks makes it difficult, often impossible, to tell who is speaking. This confusion is confounded by a narrative voice that goes in and out of the vernacular and is no more distinguishable from the characters than they are from each other. The narrative flow is further clogged by redundant adjectives like “buttes that made them feel small and tiny” (45) and a multitude of misplaced descrip­ tive phrases such as “Bradley had dreamed of his father, sleeping fitfully” (38), “There was just a cottonwood tree where the townspeople had begun to gather. The lightning flashes of a far-off storm echoed silent vibrations over the hills. One of them held a green dress” (171), and “She had a greasy skin over her shoulders like a shawl with eyes bright blue” (194). Bothersome things abound in this book. For instance, Huebner writes, “The Crow scouts tried to make him understand how many Sioux, Cheyenne and Minnecoujou [sic] had gathered there” (76). It is unlikely that the Crow would not know that Minneconjou were Sioux, so it appears that the author didn’t. Huebner writes with unusual sensibility of the sufferings of horses but does not seem to know enough about them: “He had an ungelded black stallion with white boots” (28). Is this just bad English, or does the author think there is such a thing as a gelded stallion? Later, he describes men with ropes around their necks, hands tied, running and being dragged behind galloping horses. The men suffer only stiff necks and bum marks. Given the speed and power of a galloping horse, this scenario stretches credibility more than the characters’ necks. Also puzzling is the minutely detailed description of the Little Big Horn battlefield in which no mention is made of Comanche, the personal mount of Captain Keough and the Seventh Cavalry’s sole survivor. One powerful scene, however, left this reviewer feeling even more short­ changed and frustrated by the rest of the novel, for it is a simply drawn, haunting, and honifying account of William Gentle’s (thought by some to be Crazy Horse’s 2 0 0 WAL 3 6 .1 S u m m e r 2 0 0 1 killer) first meeting with Crazy Horse. This account and flashes of realism in some of the dialogue suggest an author with unusual talent and a story inherently powerful. Unfortunately, both are undercut by the author’s writing style. Driving by Memory. By W illiam Fox. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. 165 pages, $18.95. Review ed by David Fine California State University, Long Beach Drawing on car journeys taken across the Southwest between 1996 and 1999, William Fox, an arts consultant and poet, offers in this book a series of thoughtful, lyric meditations on the meaning of land and landscape. In par­ ticular he reflects on the way land— both desert and urban— has been transformed (by everyone from highway builders to park engineers and commercial developers) into landscape, into the realm of the constructed and consumable. While he is constantly aware as he drives the Southwest of the relation­ ship between the windshield and the television screen— ways in which the land is framed and thus reduced— the act of driving nonetheless provides him a way...