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The fast red road: a plainsong

2001; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 38; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5860/choice.38-5449

1943-5975

Stephen G. Jones,

American Literature and Culture

The Fast Red Road A Plainsong is a novel which plunders, in a gleeful, two-fisted fashion, myth and pop-culture surrounding American Indian. It is a story fueled on pot fumes and blues, borrowing and distorting rigid conventions of traditional western. Indians, cowboys, and outlaws are as interchangeable as their outfits; men strike poses from Gunsmoke, and horses are traded for Trans-Ams. Pidgin, half-blood protagonist, inhabits a world of illusion of aliens, ghosts, telekinesis, and water-pistol violence where television offers redemption, and the Indian always gets it up ass. Having escaped porn factories of Utah, Pidgin heads for Clovis, NM to bury his father, Cline. But body is stolen at funeral, and Pidgin must recover it. With aid of car thief Ward, he criscrosses a wasted New Mexico, straying through bars, junkyards, and rodeos, evading cops, and tearing through barriers Dukestyle. Charlie Ward slid his thin leather belt from his jeans and held it out window, whipping cutlass faster, faster, his dyed black hair unbraiding in fifty mile per hour wind, and they never stopped for gas. Along way, Pidgin escapes a giant coyote, survives a showdown with Custer, and encounters remnants of Goliard Tribe a group of radicals to which Cline belonged.Pidgin's search allows him to reconcile death of his father with five hundred years of colonial myth-making, and will eventually place him in a position to rewrite history. Jones tells his tale in lean, poetic prose. He paints a bleak, fever-burnt west a land of strip-joints, strip-malls, and all you can eat beef-fed-beef stalls, where inhabitants speak a raw, disposable lingo. His vision is dark yet frighteningly recognizable. In tradition of Gerald Vizenor's Griever, The Fast Red Road A Plainsong blazes a trail through puppets and mirrors of myth, meeting unexpected at every turn, and proving that past texture of road can and must be changed.