POTASSETT

A Native American teenager discovers his roots in this wry and rollicking coming-of-age saga.

Young Rudi Jenkins doesn’t shed many tears over the death of his father Smiley, a Pequot Indian and “thorny bastard” given to feuding with local officials and meting out whippings to Rudi’s older brothers. He is puzzled, though, by Smiley’s cryptic deathbed references to old Pequot stories about gruesome goings-on in their community of Potassett, a down-at-the-heels satellite of the posh Connecticut resort town of Adamsport. Rudi learns that, beneath his cynical exterior, Smiley was something of a Pequot romantic who spoke the language and revived half-forgotten customs. Further stimulating his interest in Pequot lore is Iris Whitefeather, Rudi’s fetching young biology teacher, who is exploring historical sites in Potassett for clues to its Indian past. Rudi helps Iris study a 17th-century journal that sheds light on a massacre of Pequots by the English and their Mohican allies. Thanks to an elaborate vision, he gives her an eye-witness report on the confrontation between the legendary Pequot Squaw-Sachem Broken Wing and the oily Mohican traitor Uncas. This period interlude is a bit melodramatic (sample dialogue: “Go, dog, and lick the backside of your English masters”), but Young (Luck of the Draw, 2009, etc.) sets it within a piquant, sharply observed portrait of Native American life in the mid-20th century. Rudi, Smiley and their colorful family are not tragic victims of history, but thoroughly up-to-date people–shrewdly entrepreneurial and eager to get ahead even as they remain ready to assert their rights and their culture against local white grandees. Their Potassett is a raffish place where eating the raw heart of a deer and smoking hallucinogens is as much a pretext for partying as it is an offering to the Great Spirit.

A lively, atmospheric tale about modern Indians finding meaning in a storied past.