All tagged Native Americans
Nearly twenty years ago, I read a book about Native life western Montana that shook me with its vivid descriptions of place, its unsettling scenes of poverty and institutional Indian schools. Debra Magpie Earling’s Perma Red (originally published 2003) was beautiful in its intensity, startling and raw. It captured the harsh conditions of life on the Flathead Indian Reservations in the 1940s. And then it went out of print. Happily, the good folks at Milkweed Editions rectified the situation and Perma Red returned to print in the fall 2022; and I eagerly revisited the story that wowed me all those years ago.
Gregory Brown’s debut novel The Lowering Days (2021) weaves together several families' stories who make their home along the Penobscot River just as the river collects many tributaries before it dumps into the sea. Two families, both alike in dignity, make their homes in the rural woods along the Penobscot near its mouth. One, the Creels, with Lyman and Grace at its head rely on the bounty of the sea. Lyman is a decorated war vet and a lobster man. Grace, like her name, walks a gracious path through marriage and maternity even in the face of unspeakable tragedy. The other, the Ames, is the result of a love union between boat-builder and activist journalist, Arnoux and Falon respectively. These neighbors have a deep and tenuous history, like the main branches of a river where it flows into the sea; The Lowering Days follows these many streams upriver to their sources.
After experiencing the tragedies of Boone Caudill and his companion and best friend, Jim Deakins, alongside the level-headed wisdom of Dick Summers in The Big Sky, I eagerly reached for Gutherie’s second novel, The Way West. The Big Sky had certainly impressed me, and I looked forward to reading The Way West, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, wondering how Gutherie would continue the story.
