I’ve read numerous Native American-authored novels and short stories in the past few years, and have found most of them to be pretty somber stuff. I understand the reason for this common tone when it comes to describing both Native American history and contemporary reservation life for many people, but after a while it starts to become a little too much to read over and over again. I keep hoping for Native American stories of a lighter, more humorous tone, stories that are more confident about the future, but those have been harder for me to find.
So I expected Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez (especially with that title) to be more of the same old gloomy stuff – and for the most part that is exactly what is own offer here. But then just when I was very close to giving up on this collection, I figured out where Talty was heading. The twelve stories largely alternate between two distinct sets of characters living on the same Maine Penobscot Indian reservation. The first set focuses mostly on two young men who seem to desire very little out of life more than a steady supply of alcohol and drugs to help get them through their days and nights. The second group of characters is comprised of a young boy, his older (drug addicted) sister, their mother, and the medicine man their mother has taken to her bed. When the alternating stories are taken as a whole, Night of the Living Rez begins to read more like a well constructed novel than a collection of short stories, and that’s why it works so well.
“I wonder if ‘How’d we get here?’ is the wrong question. Maybe the right question is ‘How do we get out of here?’ Maybe that’s the only question that matters.
…
And then I figured it out. I had the…question all wrong. It had nothing to do with us. It had everything to do with me. How did I get here, and how do I get out?”
The two sets of stories are equally powerful, and the way they are blended into the overall narrative of Night of the Living Rez magnifies the impact of what they have to say about life for some on a contemporary Native American reservation. I was particular taken by the coming-of-age aspect of the stories featuring young David and his family as the boy learns to deal with the peculiar ways of his mother, the new man in his mother’s life, the self-destructive behavior of his sister, and a grandmother who often mistakes David for her long-dead little brother – and treats him accordingly when he goes to check on her.
Sadly, the lives of these characters are filled with one tragic mistake after another, but even though some lives are left in ruins long before the reader turns the final page of story number twelve, I was left with at least an inkling of hope that at least one or two of them were about to figure out the answer to “How do we get out of here?”
Don’t miss this one.
