William George Lindsay’s novel was the winner of Best Indie Book Award for Native American Fiction in 2023 and finalist for six other awards. I will begin this review by quoting the author directly:
Publishers want to sell books and they are all looking to what they think is just the right book on reconciliation and decolonization, soft enough to go into high school rooms and book clubs.They would have torn my book to shreds to make that happen.
This is an apt caution for would-be readers of this autobiographical novel. There is a liberal amount of humour, love, and friendship, juxtaposed with scenes of violence and exploitation. The main character, Liam, is inducted at an early age to a lifestyle of intense partying with alcohol and soft drugs.
Liam had a cruel stepmother and, later on, a selfish, arrogant stepfather. However, the antidotes to these characters are sensitive uncles, aunts, cousins, and friends. These appear regularly in the novel and he obviously loves them.
A streak of humour runs throughout the book, suppressed only briefly during the darkest passages. The lighter subjects are, among others, bingo, reservation soup, and Elvis (described as “the subject of a thousand black velvet paintings hung somewhere on every Indian reserve”). We are also introduced to the ins and outs of working in a car wash, fighting forest fires, and being a junior forest warden. More seriously though, Liam is sustained by his lifelong love of literature, and he struggles to complete his formal education. Obviously, he is also a fan of punk rock, but I am not going to comment because I am just a Broadway-loving queen myself. This book is so rich in content that the reader is drawn in and swept along chapter after chapter.
A portion of the novel is devoted to the archetypal road trip. Liam and three reservation wiseguys cross America in the Rez Rocket. They are thrown off the tourist bus at Little Big Horn, they skip Mount Rushmore (dead white colonizers) and they are not fond of the St. Louis Arch (monument to the colonization of the West—“kiss my arch”). More popular were the Canyon de Chelly, the Navajo cliff houses, and the mounds of Cahokia. I most admire the author’s prose style—consistently energetic and slangy, yet never forced or inauthentic (at least to my uneducated ear). I sincerely hope to see more of his writing in the future. A monthly column perhaps?
