Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Talking God by Tony Hillerman

1990; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.1990.0036

1948-7142

Thomas W. Ford,

Pentecostalism and Christianity Studies

Reviews 287 behind nature there may be something supernatural. The novel ends agnostic­ ally with the very puzzling, and very sexual, word:“life.” On top, No Fun on Sunday is about “the wonderful game of baseball” in the rural Midwest of the 1920s. At bottom, the novel is about two conflict­ ing conceptions of God. Sherm, a young farmer who wants to become a big leaguer, is opposed by his mother. Her God hates to see people having fun on Sunday instead of flattering Him. He’s a megalomaniac who tortures his disrespectful children in fire forever instead of rehabilitating them. Sherm thinks God must be more humane. Hasn’t He given us baseball and the skill for it? To Sherm, baseball is a religious experience, a celebration of living which God himself should enjoy. Baseball is a profound game because it’s about everybody. We’re all play­ ing it. We face at least one “pitcher” every day (God? fate? chance? nature?) and we try to get on base and score. We strike out, we hit homers, we commit errors, win, lose. A baseball diamond resembles our psyche, the mandalas Jung’s patients drew. Baseball is “a thinking man’s game,” says Manfred. Outdoors, it can be a kind of nature ritual, as in this novel. And for some players, like Sherman, baseball can also be a rite of passage, not just a kid’s game but an adult’s. It can not only produce disgraceful Pete Rose but a Stan (The Man) Musial. In the movie Bull Durham, a player tells another, “You don’t respect the game.” Manfred and Sherm and his God do. His Ma and her God don’t. A farming mishap damages Sherm permanently. “I once thought I might be able to make a homer out of my life. But it now looks like it’sonly going to be a single. Looks like you had your own way after all, Ma. I’m sure the good Lord arranged this accident for your sake.” And she doesn’t deny that her “good Lord” may have. Nevertheless, Sherm will keep playing “the great game” a little, locally, because it’s “the most glad be-all and the end-all of all things on earth that a man can do.” DEXTER MARTIN Brookings, South Dakota Talking God. By Tony Hillerman. (New York: Harper & Row, 1989. 239 pages, $17.95.) With Talking God, Tony Hillerman continues his series of highly suc­ cessful, widely acclaimed mystery novels featuring Navajo tribal police officers Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn. Other characters carried over from earlier novels include Janet Pete, the Navajo lawyer, and Mary Landon, Ghee’s white girl­ friend. Hillerman’s success rests largely on his ability to combine ethnography and mystery, creating what amounts to a unique genre. 288 Western American Literature The title comes from an elaborate Navajo healing ceremonial, called by whites the Night Chant, but called Yeibichai by the Navajos, named after their great Talking God, the maternal grandfather of all the other gods. The mask of this Talking God plays a major role in the story. More than two-thirds of the novel takes place in Washington, D.G., where Leaphorn has gone to pursue leads on the murder of an unidentified victim, and here Chee has gone to help Janet Pete with problems concerning her client, Henry Highhawk, a part Navajo conservator at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Highhawk has almost single-handedly taken on a crusade demanding that the Smithsonian release its thousands of native American skeletons for reburial. A crucial part of the mystery involves a pathetic but deadly little red-haired hit man named Fleck and some Chilean terrorists. How these seemingly unre­ lated activities of Leaphorn, Chee, and Fleck come together forms the core of the mystery, which is resolved in an action-packed climax taking place at a Smithsonian exhibit of the Masked Gods of the Americas that includes the Talking God display. Although mystery fans likelywill find primary interest in the expert native sleuthing and puzzle-solving skills of Leaphorn and Chee, contrasted with bureaucratically oriented Washington FBI agents, another of Hillerman’s strengths lies in his weaving...