Indian Affairs - Hardcover

This sequel to Woiwode's first novel (What I'm Going To Do, I Think, 1969) about a honeymooning couple in northern Michigan shows Chris and Ellen back there seven years later, dealing with marital problems and with menacing strangers. Their biggest problem by far is their childless marriage (Ellen's miscarriage was reported at the end of the earlier novel). Her secret reason for being in this cabin on her grandparents' land in the dead of winter is to write a journal about that lost child, and so assuage her guilt. Chris, too, is here to write; his dissertation on the poet Roethke's journey toward the animism of Indian culture will, he hopes, make his own purposes clearer. For Chris is part Indian; though he ``wanted to pass,'' and has succeeded, he now feels his Indian heritage asserting itself. Meanwhile, there are less psychic matters demanding attention. A broken pump needs fixing; a prowler is lurking in the woods; and some Indian kids, young punks, keep pestering Chris to buy beer for them. Add to that list prejudiced bartenders in town; a teenage arsonist roaming the countryside; an aggrieved Indian who mistakenly thinks Chris shot at his wife at the town dump...well, it all makes for a busy life. What it doesn't make for is an engaging novel, for mostly Woiwode is just crying wolf (that prowler, for example, is not unmasked until the final pages), and all these nuisances throw the novel out of whack, distracting us from the serious business of Chris and Ellen trying to break free from their pasts (a cruel father in Chris's case, a sinister grandmother in Ellen's). The result? An unworkable combination of the identity-crisis novel and the city-slickers-surrounded-by- hostile-rubes genre, delivered in prose that is all thistles and thorns. A sad fumble by this major American writer. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

More than two decades have passed since Woiwode exploded onto the literary scene with the novel What I'm Going to Do, I Think. Now, having written the distinguished novels Born Brothers and Beyond the Bedroom Wall , Woiwode has returned to his first novel's characters and setting in a sequel that matches the intensity of his early work while showing the finesse of his more recent books. It is seven years after the events of What I'm Going to Do , and Chris and Ellen are in her grandparents' cabin in northern Michigan. Chris is struggling to finish his dissertation on American poetry. But before he can come to terms with Roethke, Chris must reckon with his own identity. He seems conscious of his Native American heritage for the first time, but even as it starts to accrete significance for him, he blunders through a series of awkward encounters with local Native Americans, antagonizing a malevolent few. As in Woiwode's first novel, Chris (still armed with his .22) is the center of the fictional universe, while Ellen floats at the edges. A toughness, a brusqueness pervades the oblique forms of communication in Michigan's northern woods, and Woiwode has an uncanny ability to go from mystical transcendence to slapstick in the course of a page. Readers familiar with his work will be delighted with this novel, but it isn't a particularly good place to start reading Woiwode, as its pace and setting can become relentlessly claustrophobic for those not sufficiently initiated.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.