RED EARTH, WHITE EARTH

by Will Weaver ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 30, 1986

No lack of energy--and even some patches of fine writing--in this leave-no-topic-unturned modern western of bad blood between the rednecks and the redskins in northern Minnesota, 1984. Farm-boy Guy Pehrsson, after losing a flax crop worth $15,000 (his grandfather won't let him harvest the cut grain on Sunday; on Monday come the rains), heads for California and makes a far bigger pot of gold in, you guessed it, Silicon Valley. Nine years later, a letter from Gramps arrives: trouble, come home. After a glass of chablis (while he thinks it over), Guy hops in his gray Mercedes and drives nonstop back to the farm in Minnesota, where he finds that his stroke-ridden grandfather is still reading the Bible; his father has become a bitter and violent drunk; and his mother (she was always the sensitive one, a lot like Guy) has moved in with an Indian on the reservation, namely the good Tom Littlewolf, Guy's childhood buddy and most faithful of friends. It turns out that Tom Littlewolf has become a lawyer and is now the chief force behind legal moves to reclaim White Earth Reservation land that over the past 80 years--mainly through deceit--has been taken over by the white man and turned into farms, reducing the Indians to lives of poverty, thieving, and disease. Guy finds himself in the midst of the struggle between Indians and briner-developers as it grows very nearly into a small war--with sabotage, shootings, explosions, and finally, half by accident, the rifle death of Tom Littlewolf. Much that is deeply routine (a screen-ready Senator; an agri-business investor; the gorgeous Cassandra Silver, press aide to the Senator and can't-help-herself lover of the increasingly James Bond-like Guy; the murderously deranged sheriff who didn't survive Vietnam quite with a full deck, etc.) is intertwined here with skillful evocations of farm life land, the plight of the Indians, and growing up in the country. Popular entertainment that pushes all the themes-of-today buttons and rolls right along while doing it. Said by its publisher to be slated for a TV miniseries.

Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1986

ISBN: 0873515552

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION