Green Grass, Running Water

I just now finished Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water, on a recommendation from a good friend a few years ago. It was fantastic. I'm so glad I read it - it wasn't quite like anything I had read before. This book focuses on a number of characters with Native American heritage that are converging on a town called Blossom for an annual sun dance festival. The story also includes four elder protagonists, the Lone Ranger, Robinson Crusoe, Ishmael, and Hawkeye in addition to a Coyote that are trying to fix the broken world. I don't recall whether I bought this book from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or from eBay, to be honest. But I got it affordably around Christmas time last year.

"Green Grass, Running Water" Book Cover

The main characters all have different stories and backgrounds and are very human in their motivations and trials. It is frequently touching. The tone of the book is relatively lighthearted and even humorous, but quite real in that it makes no illusion that there are issues in the protagonists' lives and in the world that they live in. I'll touch on just a few of the characters in this blog.

Alberta may have stolen the show for me. She's an independent woman who wants children but does not want to get married. She has a couple of boyfriends, both of whom know about the other. She visits a fertilization facility, and they keep asking where her husband is. She tells them simply she isn't married.

Lionel, one of Alberta's boyfriends who sells televisions for a living, is trying to turn his life around. Maybe go back to school and look for a change in his career path. His story is touching as well; however, it is riddled with indecisiveness as he struggles to even determine what he wants his role to be in his relationship with Alberta.

Eli, the last one I will touch on, is Lionel's uncle and lives in a log cabin at the base of a dam that was constructed allegedly on behalf of the natives but in reality, on a whimsical capitalistic impulse striving for progress without a clear objective of what that would look like. Eli refuses to leave his cabin so that the full construction project of the dam can come to fruition. It ends up costing him his house and much more. He wasn't being obstructive to get in the way or to challenge the developers. He was just living in his home. The dam itself is another instance of a random and bizarre miscommunication in this novel...an unwanted objective that was thrust upon another party.

A number of times throughout this book, the natives are wrestling with their heritage and their present lives...trying to reconcile one with the other. I was struck how, frequently during conversations, the characters don't seem to be listening to each other at all. J.D. Salinger does this well in his dialogue, too. It's striking because it is both realistic and a little heart-breaking. Visitors to Blossom are often insistent on taking photographs of the sun dance festival without even attempting to comprehend how that is a violation of the natives and their heritage. It, too, is heart-breaking in a way that I struggle to describe. It makes the reader ask 'why???'

Green Grass, Running Water, again, was a fantastic novel and I'm glad I read it. I'm grateful for the recommendation and it was nice to get outside of my usual reading selections and read something so fresh and different.