Extra Indians
A road novel that moves between a long-haul truck driver’s present and his haunted past, where war, friendship, and family wounds remain unresolved.
Work Information
Only memory survives the snow.
Gansworth uses a trucking route to uncover buried histories of war, adoption, and estrangement. The novel balances lyricism, humor, and grief.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Milkweed Editions
- Published
- 2010-11-01
- Pages
- 272 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.97 x 2.54 x 21.59 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781571310798
- ISBN-10
- 1571310797
- Price
- 4398 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Women's Fiction/Domestic Life
Every winter, Tommy Jack McMorsey watches the meteor showers in northern Minnesota. On the long haul from Texas to Minnesota, Tommy encounters a deluded Japanese tourist determined to find the buried ransom money from the movie Fargo . When the Japanese tourist dies of exposure in Tommy Jack’s care, a media storm erupts and sets off a series of journeys into Tommy Jack’s past as he remembers the horrors of Vietnam, a love affair, and the suicide of his closest friend, Fred Howkowski. Exploring with great insight and wit the ways images, stereotypes, and depictions intersect with, Extra Indians offers a powerful glimpse into contemporary Native American life.
Reviews
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Gansworth's latest installment in his Tuscarora novel cycle brings us into Tommy Jack McMorsey's internal world finally where we learn what motivates this roughcut trucker's duplicity in marriage, his rationalization of his many lies, his obsession with building a historically accurate village, brick by brick, his secret parentage of a young Tuscarora girl, and his casting aside of his adopted Indian son. We see Annie Boans, a Tuscarora professor, confront her father (Tommy Jack) with the truth of his love for her mother, Shirley Mounter, while Annie supports T.J. Howkowski's reunion with his estranged adoptive father (also Tommy Jack). We learn of Tommy Jack's bloody discovery of T.J.'s father's suicide, alone in a Hollywood studio apartment, staving off post-Vietnam PTSD by eating can upon can of apricots, yet spiritually starving by virtue of his failure to make it as a Hollywood Indian. A gripping read from start to finish and one complemented by Gansworth's own paintings (as are all of the novels in this cycle), EXTRA INDIANS is not to be missed: a definite best read of 2010.