N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn
The subject of Momaday’s first novel is named Abel, a young Native American adult who grew up on the reservation but was drafted and served in Vietnam, only to run into the common difficulties experienced by soldiers returning from that conflict. He returns to the reservation in New Mexico, yet, scarred by the conflict and returning with a drinking problem, he’s unable to resume his previous life and ends up stabbing a man he claims is a witch to death. After serving a term in prison, he’s paroled to Los Angeles, where he finds himself unable to assimilate into society, drinking to excess, losing any job he gets, sabotaging his only relationships, and eventually returning to the reservation after nearly dying from his own inability to manage his rage.
I have no Native American blood and close to zero knowledge of the cultures of the various tribes that exist or have existed within the borders of the current United States, so I was at an insurmountable cultural disadvantage in trying to read and understand House Made of Dawn. That said, I’m a white guy who enjoys much African-American literature that engages in similar techniques of metaphorical writing and magical realism, works that draw on experiences I haven’t had and probably can never fully grasp. Those authors, the Toni Morrisons and the Alice Walkers and the Zora Neale Thurstons and so on, manage to translate those experiences in ways that readers without them can appreciate, even if we can’t connect with them on the same fundamental level. That to me is Momaday’s failure here: I could barely tell what Abel was doing, and I never had the chance to relate to the emotional side of his character. We know he came back from the war a damaged person, but never get the details of why; suddenly he’s knifed a guy for no apparent reason other than that he was drunk. I know there’s more to it than that, but it wasn’t on the pages and that prevented me from getting anything close to what the Pulitzer committee must have seen in the book.
Next review: Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice