For some reason I had the impression that colonialism in North America was less bloody than in Africa, involving more diseased blankets and deceptive treaties and less outright murder. I learnt how wrong I was at the Akta Lakota Museum in South Dakota. The massacre at Wounded Knee is as stomach-churning a use of guns on unarmed people as anything Kitchner did in Sudan. I bought this book there, as the back cover told me Welch is a relatively important Native American writer.
It’s about a young man who goes on a bender while looking for the girlfriend who has left him. I wish I could say I enjoyed it but it’s profoundly not my kind of book. First of all, it’s clearly a boys’ book. I can’t defend this definition, other than to say I know them when I see them. Second, it has one of those motive-less protagonists so beloved of midcentury fiction. If even the protagonist doesn’t care what they are doing, I find it hard to do so myself.
Let me give you a taste:
First Raise got us each a cup of coffee and watched us drink. It was beginning to get light. He loved us. He watched us drink the bitter coffee down. In the living room beside the oil stove, my grandmother snored. Beneath the closed door leading off the kitchen, Theresa slept or didn’t sleep.
Perhaps there are some people who don’t find this annoying. If so, I am not one of them.