Although the novel grabbed me from its opening sentence, it also sort of snuck up on me, in that I suddenly realized, as I was reading, that I cared an awful lot about the characters and what they were going through — they felt very real. This is especially impressive, because first-person narratives are rarely so effective (I think?) in focusing on vividly evoking the lifeworlds of all the other characters — one would think that they were more invested in illuminating the mind of the narrator-protagonist. Which this novel also does, but somehow it was all the women in the text — women whom the narrator strains to have a relationship with, some of whom he almost never sees — that felt most fully explored to me, even, paradoxically, through the narrator’s lack of knowledge about them.
It’s a heavy book, but not a punishing one. It doesn’t shy away from hard truths about the Indigenous American experience — especially the complexities of tribal belonging, blood quantum, and inherited (or forgotten) tradition — but nor does it demand the reader’s suffering as the price for being privvy to this perspective. It’s also very much a story about caring for a parent with dementia, which is painful in many of the ways you would expect, but also registers very differently to me from other narratives I’ve read about this. I think it’s that it doesn’t have the sense of a sudden opacity or otherness, of someone once familiar becoming a stranger. Somehow — and again, I want to say that this is bound up in a surprising way with the narrator’s lack of knowledge about his mother’s inner world — you encounter her as she is, you get to know her as she is at this moment, rather than mourning the loss of her past self.
It was only weeks after I’d finished the novel that I realized that there was a really fascinating parallel between the mother who whose dementia made her unable to recognize her son, and the daughter who did not know who her true father was. And in this way, both are part of a larger reflection on identity and knowledge: what do you need to know about yourself, your history, your people? What makes you who you are?
There’s not much in the way of plot, yet when you come to the end, it feels like there’s been a seismic shift. It’s a really powerful book.
Kasia Reads 