TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/120991/1209471.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 3.7 KB | 82 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 86

People of the Monkey Wrench


By JOHN SKOW

ALMANAC OF THE DEAD
By Leslie Marmon Silko
Simon & Schuster; 763 pages; $25


    For disaffected counterculture dreamers of the 1970s, the
coziest and most satisfying fantasy of vengeance against the
Establishment and its plastic society was Edward Abbey's
mischievous novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. The good guys
sabotaged bulldozers and plotted to blow up Glen Canyon Dam on
the Colorado River, and it was all a lot of fun. Twenty years
nearer to a millennial sunset that no longer looks rosy, a
vengeful, prophetic novel of cultural retribution appears, and
there is nothing cozy about it.

    If there is a message to the U.S. society's doubters in
Almanac of the Dead, it is "too late." For the very angry
author, whose ancestry is Hispanic, Laguna Indian and white, the
problem is not that the entire white man's culture transplanted
from Europe to the Americas is sick, but rather that it is
itself a sickness, bloody and metastasizing. What Leslie Marmon
Silko's novel foretells with exultant rage is the fury of Native
Americans from Mexico to Alaska who have had to live for 500
years on what she sees as an infected continent.

    Glen Canyon Dam, sure enough, crumbles one more time,
brought down by a Native American suicide squad. And in the
Mexican state of Chiapas, Yaqui Indians follow two brothers who,
guided by the spirit voices of macaws, retake the high country
from the Hispanics who scorn and oppress them. In Alaska, a
Yupik woman knows how to down airplanes by hexing television
sets with a fox pelt. Near Tucson, two half-breed witches,
elderly twin sisters, import cocaine to undermine the enemy and
buy guns to store at their fortified ranch. Wherever it is
shown, the white society is murderous, corrupt, mad with greed
and hideously perverted. Among the white characters, and quite
typical of the rest, are a federal judge who has sex with his
basset hounds and a reptilian homosexual who steals the baby of
a drug-soaked stripteaser for use in a torture video.

    The ruling society has gone septic and sterile. Lecha, one
of the twin witches, who can find lost objects and dead bodies,
notices that "affluent, educated white people . . . sought
[her] out in secret. They all had come to her with a deep
sense that something had been lost . . . lottery tickets,
worthless junk bonds or lost loved ones; but Lecha knew the loss
was their connection with the earth." Later an Indian orator
picks up the theme. Spirit voices direct white mothers "to pack
the children in the car and drive off hundred-foot cliffs or
into flooding rivers . . . The spirits whisper in the brains of
loners, the crazed young white men with automatic rifles who
slaughter crowds in shopping malls or school yards as casually
as hunters shoot buffalo."

    The author's sentences have a drive and a sting to them.
But the receptacle of her crowded, raging, enormously long book
swirls with half-digested revulsion, half-explained characters
and, a white elitist must add, more than a little
self-righteousness. The novel's long first half is a dull
headache, because most of the dozen or more narrators, none of
whom knows what is going on, are drunk, doped or crazy.

    Yet angry prophets can't be expected to write neat,
button-down denunciations. Old Indian legends, the author
relates, say that after a very long time, the cruel and greedy
white conquerors will weaken and vanish. Her intention is to
bring readers to the point at which this is about to happen, and
her success is far more troubling than her failure.