Quiet until the thaw

Alexandra Fuller, 1969-

Book - 2017

"From bestselling memoirist Alexandra Fuller, a debut novel. Lakota Oglala Sioux Nation, South Dakota. Two Native American cousins, Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson, though bound by blood and by land, find themselves at odds as they grapple with the implications of their shared heritage. When escalating anger towards the injustices, historical and current, inflicted upon the Lakota people by the federal government leads to tribal divisions and infighting, the cousins go in separate directions: Rick chooses the path of peace; You Choose, violence. Years pass, and as You Choose serves time in prison, Rick finds himself raising twin baby boys, orphaned at birth, in his meadow. As the twins mature from infants to young men, Ric...k immerses the boys within their ancestry, telling wonderful and terrible tales of how the whole world came to be, and affirming their place in the universe as the result of all who have come before and will come behind. But when You Choose returns to the reservation after three decades behind bars, his anger manifests, forever disrupting the lives of Rick and the boys. A complex tale that spans generations and geography, Quiet Until the Thaw conjures with the implications of an oppressed history, how we are bound not just to immediate family but to all who have come before and will come after us, and, most of all, to the notion that everything was always, and is always, connected. As Fuller writes, "The belief that we can be done with our past is a myth. The past is nudging at us constantly.""--

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Subjects
Genres
Domestic fiction
Historical fiction
Published
New York, New York : Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 2017.
Language
English
Main Author
Alexandra Fuller, 1969- (author)
Physical Description
269 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9780735223349
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

A WHITE WRITER, born in Britain, raised in colonial Africa and residing for years in Wyoming, writes a novel about the Oglala Lakota of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. In a prefatory note included with advance copies of the book, she cites a three-month visit she made to Pine Ridge in 2011. "For the first time since coming to the United States in the mid-90s, I neither needed to explain myself nor have this world explained to me/' she says. Being on the reservation felt like an "unexpected homecoming, if home is where your soul can settle in recognition." The writer is Alexandra Fuller, and from this jolt of recognition she fashioned "Quiet Until the Thaw," a novel that dives deep into Lakota culture and history. An author of six books of nonfiction who made her name with a searing memoir of her African childhood, Fuller is here a careful inventor: Many of the events she describes, at least one of her central characters and more than a few snippets of dialogue are rooted in fact. The novel is peppered with Lakota words, not all of them easily translatable, and the story she recounts, of a pair of Oglala boys whose lives on the reservation become fatefully entwined, is an impassioned allegory of the long-suffering Lakota people. More subtly, it's an awed meditation on the lofty conundrums of time and being, and on the ways oppression seeks to blind us to the fundamental interconnectedness of things. Fuller's novel is like a delicately calibrated tuning fork, resonating at a cosmic pitch. That she wrests such sweep from a couple of hundred odd pages is itself a bit aweinspiring. Like Rick Overlooking Horse, one of the two Oglala boys, who speaks only when necessary - by the time he turns 10, "he had uttered, all told, about enough words to fill a pamphlet from the Rezurrection Ministry outfit based out of Dallas, Tex." - Fuller is terse. She doesn't narrate so much as poetically distill, into chapters seldom more than a page and a half long, the beauty, violence, poverty, humiliation and resilience that have marked Lakota existence for several hundred years. In one, a young tribal activist travels to Palestine, where she dines on camel with Yasir Arafat and speaks at an event honoring leaders of indigenous groups. "They can rewrite history, and erase our stories. But what my mind hasn't been allowed to know, my body has always known," the activist tells her audience. "I am an undeniable, inconvenient body of knowledge. Read me." She proceeds to stand before the crowd in silence for 15 minutes. The punch Fuller's book packs is visceral, but it wears its righteousness with tact, its tone more consolation than jeremiad. At its heart is a bifurcation. Orphaned at birth, Rick Overlooking Horse and another parentless boy, You Choose Watson, are raised in a tar-paper lean-to by Rick Overlooking Horse's grandmother, Mina, the local midwife. Although not prone to chattiness herself, Mina is disposed, especially when high on Wahupta, to recount to her young charges tribal myths and battle tales, and to instill in them an appreciation for key Lakota precepts regarding the "eternal nature of everything." "They say you've been here from the very start, and you'll be here to the very end," she tells her stupefied grandson. "Like that breath you just took. In the beginning, a dinosaur breathed that breath. Then a tree. Then an ant. Then you, now me." Mina's teachings suggest a vision of politics as enlightened forbearance - since what goes around comes around - and Rick Overlooking Horse, assisted by some Wahupta experimentation of his own, comes to embrace this view. He gets sent to Vietnam, where he survives the casual racism of his fellow G.I.s, along with a friendly-fire napalm bomb that solders his dog tag to his chest and vaporizes the rest of his squad. He returns to the reservation resolved "never to lay so much as the tip of a single finger on the diseased currency of the White Man," and installs himself in a tepee on a patch of empty land. You Choose, meanwhile, channels his rage into violence. He feigns diabetes to escape the draft, and wanders north, dabbling in odd jobs and drug dealing before returning to the reservation and getting himself elected chairman of his increasingly restive tribe. Here, the disparity between the two men comes into sharp relief. Rick Overlooking Horse, acquiring a reputation for spiritual wisdom, is sought out by addicts, wounded veterans and the lovesick, while You Choose becomes a figure of terror. Like Richard (Dick) Wilson, the notorious chairman of the Oglala Lakota from 1972 to 1976, whom he closely resembles, You Choose plunders tribal funds, sidelines opponents and surrounds himself with a private militia, the Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOONs). There are bloody clashes over purity (like Wilson, You Choose is of mixed blood) and over colonization (tribe members whose lifestyles are regarded as too white are referred to as "Colonized Indian Asses," or C.I.A.). The murder rate surpasses that of New York and Detroit. The conflict culminates in the novel as it did in life, with the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee, where Rick Overlooking Horse and hundreds of other protesters demand You Choose's removal as tribal chairman and the resumption of treaty negotiations with the federal government. United States marshals descend, thousands of rounds are fired, and both Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose end up doing jail time. Of course, the story doesn't end there, or - and this is Fuller's point - anywhere. The desperation and the violence, the enlightened forbearance and the silent protest: It all persists. Toward the end of the novel, another pair of Indian boys are born and promptly orphaned; the cycle of being and time continues, and sooner or later, what happens on the reservation implicates us all. Such, at least, is Fuller's reading of Lakota creed. Is it a reading she is entitled to make? Is her intuitive identification with the Lakota sufficient to justify her novel? Does her novel require justification? And not least, is a non-Native reader qualified to review it? These questions are as complicated as they are unavoidable, at a moment when the spectacle of white artists retailing stories, images and, especially, traumas associated with people of color has ignited fierce debate. In May, the editor of a magazine put out by the Writers Union of Canada resigned amid outrage over an editorial he published lamenting white writers' fear of committing cultural appropriation, and proposing an "Appropriation Prize" for the "best book by an author who writes about people who aren't even remotely like her or him." Some critics found particularly galling the fact that the editorial had appeared in an issue devoted to indigenous literature. It's possible that "Quiet Until the Thaw" may strike some readers as a similar affront, a misguided exercise in appropriation by an author who isn't remotely like her subjects. It may be possible to pry from Fuller's novel stereotypes or clichés - the quiet Indian, the soulful Indian, the potsmoking sage. Or to hear in the voice of her narrator ("Oh, All My Ancestors. How much strength must one people have?") not homage but pastiche. To these and other potential objections, this reader can offer only her candid appraisal, that this is an ardent, original and beautifully wrought book, one that deserves the benefit of the doubt. The conflict culminates in the novel as it did in life, with the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee. EMILY EAKIN has written for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

Fuller, who was born in England, has written memoirs about growing up in southern Africa, including Leaving before the Rains Come (2015). She married an American, and in 1994, she moved to Wyoming. In 2011, Fuller spent three months on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, immersing herself in the ways of the Oglala Lakota; this, her debut novel, emerged from that experience. It's a tale of two dramatically different cousins born in 1994. Rick Overlooking Horse is a man of shockingly few words, Quiet like the Thaw, as an old Cree poem phrases it. You Choose Watson has been violent from childhood. The cousins take different life paths. Rick serves in Vietnam, while You Choose becomes an activist and ends up in prison. Fuller movingly portrays their seemingly hopeless, fate-driven journeys framed by Pine Ridge itself, where the only people with jobs were soldiers, tribal cops, Catholic priests, and undercover DEA narcs. Fuller's kinship with Lakota traditions in this novel is palpable; it will be interesting to see how this manifests itself in her future literary endeavors.--Donovan, Deborah Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In her first novel, Fuller-English by birth but raised in Zimbabwe and now living in Wyoming-conjures the story of a group of Lakota Sioux struggling to make sense of their lives on the rez. A taciturn Indian boy named Rick Overlooking Horse and his rambunctious cousin, You Choose Watson, are raised by their grandmother until they are shipped off to the white man's boarding school in Oklahoma. Even so, Rick is wise from an early age. After being badly maimed in Vietnam, he returns home to pitch a teepee and grow sacred weed on a piece of empty land that becomes a place of pilgrimage. His people come for advice, and for purification. And though he does not think of himself as their leader, when he travels to Wounded Knee they follow him to form what becomes the momentous protest of 1973. You Choose avoids military service but ends up in prison, after a stint as a corrupt and violent tribal chairman during the period when the American Indian Movement is at its zenith. While You Choose serves time, Rick raises twin boys, wards of a feisty Lakota woman named Le-a, who after her own defiant youth makes sure the orphans learn the ways of their ancestors. But when You Choose returns to the rez, tragedy ensues, and the twins, too, must find their own way. Fuller's keen sense of engagement with a land "to which you now don't belong," and her place as an outsider, make her a sympathetic storyteller. Her prose shimmers and vibrates with life in this excellent novel. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

In her debut novel, celebrated memoirist Fuller (Leaving Before the Rain Comes) aims to honor the history and culture of the Lakota Oglala Sioux Nation of South Dakota, focusing on two cousins who represent divergent responses to ongoing injustice. Rick Overlooking Horse returns terribly wounded from Vietnam, craftily avoided by You Choose Watson (later What Son), then goes to live outside the village, raising horses, refusing to deal with the White Man's money, and earning a wise man's reputation. You Choose sprints far from the Rez and tries out different Indian identities but always puts his interests first. Fuller unwinds a story of ongoing poverty and suffering, from grandmother Mina's forced separation from family at boarding school, the need to "play possum" when the Bureau of Indian Affairs come 'round (its motto: "Kill the Indian, Save the Man"), the irony of Indians serving in Vietnam and Iraq, and the standoff at Wounded Knee, right down to You Choose's stint as corrupt tribal leader and head-on conflict with his cousin. -VERDICT Indignant on behalf of American Indians and imbued with Indian spirituality, Fuller tells a complex and satisfying story, eschewing the dark, weighty tone one might expect for light, mocking language. It's an intelligent choice, but some readers will chafe. [See Prepub Alert, 12/12/17.] © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A lyrical tale of life on the Rez.British-born Fuller (Leaving Before the Rains Come, 2015, etc.), who has written several captivating memoirs about growing up in Africa as well as a biography, of sorts, about the short life of a cowboy, makes her fiction debut with a story set on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Now living in Wyoming, Fuller visited the reservation in 2011 to witness the annual commemoration of the murder of Crazy Horse, where she felt an "unexpected homecoming." In short chapters and spare language, Fuller spins a narrative that reads like a parable about two markedly different cousins, born within a month of each other: the contemplative Rick Overlooking Horse, "a child, and then a man, of shockingly few words"; and the volatile You Choose Watson, "half Cowboy, half Indian," and all trouble. Severely burned by friendly fire when he was in the Army, Rick Overlooking Horse (as in a fairy tale, Fuller always refers to him by his full name) returned home and moved far out in the desert, refusing his military pension or disability allowance, which he called "the diseased currency of the White Man." Eking out a living selling herbal medicine, he earned a reputation as a sage. When people came to him "with their wounded hearts and curdled souls," he gently guided them "out of all the noisy unbecoming we do between birth and death." Rick Overlooking Horse did not become the Lakota Oglala's shaman or chief: he "simply became." You Choose, though, boiled with anger: "it was as if everything that had happened to himor failed to happen to himturned toxic in his brain, flooded his veins with urgency." Not surprisingly, he ends up in prison. Twins orphaned at birth; You Choose's unexpected release from jail; a protest siege; and a death propel a plot that gets overly complicated at the end. But Fuller is interested less in events than kinship ("rocks are grandfathers, plants are nations"), forgiveness, and "mild spiritual epiphanies." A tender, wry homage to Native American wisdom and lore. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.