“Green Grass, Running Water” is chiefly the story of Lionel Red Dog, a stereo and television salesman in the tiny western Canadian town of Blossom. Lionel is pestered by his aunt, who wants him to move back to the reservation. He is sneered at by his white boss, who thinks he’s got no gumption. And he’s held at arm’s length by his sometime girlfriend, a college professor in Calgary who disappears for weeks whenever he brings up marriage. To top it off, Lionel can’t decide who he is or what to do with his life, and to really top it off, he is turning 40.
But this isn’t just Lionel’s story. It is also the story of his Uncle Eli, who has singlehandedly stalled a government dam’s completion by refusing to move out of the cabin he inherited from his mother. It is the story of Alberta, Lionel’s girlfriend who continually ponders how to conceive and raise a child without the encumbrance of a husband. Then there is Latisha, Lionel’s sister, who runs the Dead Dog Cafe, where “dog meat” is on the menu and where tourists buy the lie because it confirms their preconception about Indians. Add four aged Indian escapees from a mental institution who may be shamans or magicians. Stir in the talking coyote, who keeps trying to narrate the story of the creation of the world, and you’ve got a recipe for a bizarrely comic fictional stew.
Well into the novel, Lionel asks Uncle Eli why he retired from a college teaching job in Toronto and returned to the Blackfoot Indian reservation. “Can’t tell you that straight out,” Eli replies. “Wouldn’t make any sense. Wouldn’t be much of a story.”
That interchange is a rough summary of the whole book, in which nothing proceeds “straight out.” King is not only a storyteller, he is a story lover, and he is particularly fond of the detours that a good tale always takes. A small example: while sorting out her life, Alberta finds herself thinking of her former husband: " Bob teased her, said that their relationship was a slow burn, like igniting a peach. Alberta was sure Bob hadn’t made that up, but she liked it. It was clever, and the idea of a soft, fuzzy peach, full of juice and sparkling flesh all aglow in flames, was intellectually erotic." Typically, King begins with a good one-liner and then plays with it, using it to illuminate a corner of Alberta’s character.
“Green Grass, Running Water” is wryly told, but beneath its sunny surface lies an icy bedrock of hardship. The burdens of bigotry and condescension are very much a part of these lives, as is the anxiety the characters feel in defining Indianness, in balancing their culture against the white culture surrounding them. The book’s title hints that King has serious things on his mind. “As long as the grass is green and the water runs” was boiler plate casually inserted in treaties between whites and Indians. It signified perpetuity. Now, of course, it means the opposite.
But King, while capable of righteous anger, avoids didacticism. Intercutting the stories of Lionel, Eli and Alberta with tales from Native American folklore-which is often broadly funny-he has found a way to fuse a comic view of life with the inarguably tragic facts of Native American history. Successfully mixing realism and myth, comedy and tragedy (and any writer who can bring off a talking coyote has to be called successful), King has produced a novel that defies all our expectations about what Native American fiction should be. It is a first-class work of art.
PHOTO: Storyteller, story lover: Author King with ceremonial Indian mask, at home in St. Paul (STEVE WOIT)
DEFINITELY A LAUGHING MATTER
Thomas King grew his first mustache when he was 35, and all he caught was flak. His friends told him to shave it off, because “Indians don’t grow mustaches.” King was amused, a little irked, but not surprised. “You always run into this demand that you must look like who you are,” he says. Currently head of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota, King, 49, finds himself “constantly butting my head” against cliches about Indians, especially “the sense in North America that all Native material is absolutely, positively sacred.” He is a lot more irreverent, and so, he says, are “most of the Native people that I’ve hung out with.” Indian joking is notable for its “inclusivity,” says King, who is of Cherokee, Greek and German descent. He strives to give his own stories the “kind of humor where everybody is laughing.” Not that he wants to turn his characters into clowns. “I think of myself as a serious writer,” he says. “Tragedy is my topic. Comedy is my strategy.
