Louis Owens: Literary Reflections on His Life and Work ed. by Jacquelyn Kilpatrick (review)

B o o k R e v ie w s 2 0 9 Louis Owens: Literary Reflections on His Life and Work. Edited by Jacquelyn Kilpatrick. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004- 320 pages, $33.95. Reviewed by David Mogen Colorado State University, Fort Collins Obviously conceived before it became apparent that this would be the first retrospective assessment of Louis Owens’s too-brief but distinguished career (after his unexpected death in 2002), this excellent collection of “literary reflections” provides a probing and timely survey of his life and work. Though most of the anthology consists of literary criticism, the book opens with a poem and interview and closes with a personal essay combining narrative about a flyfishing trip with thematic analysis, a kind of hybrid discourse that Owens himself explored extensively in Mixedbbod Messages (1998) and I Hear the Train (2001). For those familiar with or curious about his diverse achievements, Louis Owens: Literary Reflections on His Life and Work provides wide-ranging interpretations of his multifaceted contributions in fiction, scholarship, and personal essays. In her introduction, editor Jacquelyn Kilpatrick emphasizes that these col­ lected writings “vary widely in topic, scope, and point of view” as a response to Owens’s own “brilliant complexity and remarkable style” (15), and a survey of the titles and topics they address suggests the range ofinterlocking themes in his work. For instance, the title of A. Robert Lee’s interesting interview “Outside Shadow,” “taken from a Choctaw phrase [Owens] much favored” (20), adapts a tribal construct about inner and outer self surviving in the afterlife so that the outer shadow becomes an indigenous metaphor connecting Owens’s earliest memories with his postmodernist theory and his hilarious but poignant remi­ niscences about appearing on French television as a celebrity Native American writer accompanied by “dancing dogs and clarinet-playing clowns” (47). Other phrases from the more specifically focused critical interpretations indicate the variety of themes and perspectives orchestrated in Owens’s theoretical work as well as in his fictional and personal narratives: there are essays on his “‘Post’colonial Fiction,” on “Crossreading” both texts and identity, on the relation­ ship between Dark River (1999) and the “‘New’ Indian Novel,” on race and gender, on mythological space, on working-class consciousness, on wilderness, and on ludic violence. And finally there is “You Got to Fish Ever Godamn Day,” which takes its title from Owens’s final collection of personal and theo­ retical reflections in I Hear the Train, suggesting the importance of fishing and hunting as both literal and symbolic themes throughout his work. Often we don’t realize how important a presence is until it departs. Reading through this anthology has reminded me—as I suspect it will others who teach and write about Native American literature—of just how distinc­ tive and indispensable a voice Owens had become during the past two decades. 2 1 0 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 5 His book of criticism, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (1992), remains the most coherent and nuanced overall interpretation of the subject, developing in depth a perspective connecting postmodernist theory to Trickster word-play that creatively integrates Western and Native traditions of discourse. His five novels range through intricately interwoven natural and cul­ tural landscapes, each having its own symbolic resonance in Owens’s fiction. As Susan Bemardin’s essay suggests, many of these themes converge in his absurdist, postmodernist tour-de-force Dark River, his final novel, which in retrospect at least reads as his witty and eloquent swan song. And I’m glad to see acknowl­ edged throughout these writings Owens’s singular achievement in his final two collections of essays, with their fascinating interweaving of personal narrative, literary commentary, and cultural criticism. This broad-ranging anthology cap­ tures much of the multidimensional appeal of Owens’s major writings and serves as a worthy tribute to a literary and scholarly voice that is now an invaluable part of our heritage. Ordinary Wolves. By Seth Kantner. Minneapolis, Minn.: Milkweed Editions, 2004...