A preachy environmental message dominates this tale of the 18th century.
As a Native American slave returns home, the Spaniards who accompany her learn to better appreciate nature in this historical novel.
In the late 1700s, 14-year-old Watili enjoys a peaceful life with her family in the village of the Parussi band of the Ute tribe (in present-day Colorado). They enjoy what author Garcia (Shared Lives, Twin Sun, 2016, etc.) describes as their “Oneness with Nature.” However, their tranquility is shattered when a band of Apache Indians raids their village in search of people to enslave. Watili and her brother are captured and forced to march more than 700 miles. Upon reaching El Paso, they’re sold into servitude, and Watili begins work as a slave maid for a Spanish family. She dreams of returning to her own loved ones back home, and the opportunity to do so arises when she meets Don Bernardo, a famous Spanish explorer and cartographer. The two agree to work together: Watili will show Bernardo lucrative sources of gold and silver ore near her village if he takes her there and grants her freedom. The two embark on their journey, soon to be joined by a charming cibolero (Spanish buffalo hunter), and the trio find plenty of adventure along the way. This book is valuable in how it details the slave trade among Native American peoples—a topic that will be unfamiliar to many readers. However, because Garcia offers no notes on the novel’s historicity, the reader has little to no sense of what’s fact or fiction. The book’s biggest weakness, though, is its lack of subtlety in its spiritual message. The author is so adamant about advocating “Nature” that his characters to seem more like mouthpieces than real people. For example, here’s the final exchange of the two Spaniards: “ ‘What we have seen was the experience of two Europeans…two outsiders who were given a rare glimpse into the Oneness of God and Nature.’ ‘I am moved by this experience….’ ‘My knowledge of the spiritual realm has awoken.’ ” A subtler approach would have been more likely to engage readers.
A preachy environmental message dominates this tale of the 18th century.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9903739-3-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Jornado de Exodo-Journey of Exodus
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the elusive Pynchon regularly cranked out novels, then this latest addition to his semi-classic oeuvre would be considered an excellent, if flawed, fiction, not as demanding and complex as Gravity's Rainbow, nor as neat and clever as The Crying of Lot 49 and V. As it is, coming 17 years since the last book, it's something of a disappointment.
Yes, it's compulsively funny, full of virtuoso riffs, and trenchant in its anarcho-libertarian social commentary. But there's a missing dimension in this tale of post-Sixties malaise—a sense of characters being more than an accumulation of goofy allusions and weird behavior. And all of its winding, conspiratorially digressive plot adds up to a final moment of apparently unintentional kitsch—a limp scene reuniting a girl and her dog. Built on flashbacks to the 60's, the story reenacts in 1984 the struggles that refuse to disappear. Not politics really, but the sense of solidarity and betrayal that marks both periods for the numerous characters that wander into this fictional vortex. At the center is Frenesi (Free and Easy) Gates, who's anything but. A red-diaper baby and radical film-maker during the rebellion-charged 60's, Frenesi sold her soul to a man in uniform, the quintessential Nixon-Reagan fascist, Brock Vond, a fed whose manic pursuit of lefties and dopers finds him abusing civil rights over three decades. He's motivated not just by innate evil, but by his obsession with Frenesi, whom he sets up as a sting-operation expert protected under the Witness Protection Program. Meanwhile, the venomous Vond sees to it that Frenesi's hippie husband, Zoyd Wheeler, and her daughter, Prairie, are "disappeared" to Vineland, the northern California town where L.A. counterculturalists lick their collective wounds among the redwoods, and bemoan "the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into." Brilliant digressions on Californian left-wing history, the saga of The People's Republic of Rock and Roll, a Mob wedding, and the living dead known as the Thanatoids all come bathed in the clarity of Pynchon's eye-popping language.
Pynchon's latest should prove to the legions of contemporary scribbler-fakers that it isn't enough to reproduce pop-schlock on the page, it needs to be siphoned through the kind of imaginative genius on display everywhere here.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0141180633
Page Count: 385
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1990
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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