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A review by powerpuffgoat
The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
slow-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
1.0
I have to say that I was already a little bit prejudiced about this book because I read this author's preface for a collection of short stories and it came across as disjointed nonsense. I had no idea what he was trying to say, or whether even he knew what he was trying to say. And he was only asked to write a short intro for stories that were not his own!
So when I set off to read his own book I was already cautious, and it's a good job that I was. His writing is actually atrocious. I'm not sure what the editing process looked like for this book or any of his other writing, but once again it reads like ramblings of a madman. It goes on and on in some places, then in other places the narration skips forward before you can figure out what happens.
It seems like all of his characters had the same verbal tics and the same thought processes which again I can only blame on the writing. If you going to be writing a story with multiple points of view you've got to make sure that these points of you can be easily told apart. Instead, the pacing is all over the place and the POVs switch seemingly out of nowhere, sometimes mid-paragraph.
Now, my perspective is obviously limited when it comes to indigenous people of North America, so I understand that there are certain nuances that would be unavailable to me and I don't expect a fiction writer to provide all of the context about what it's like to be an "Indian" in modern day United States. However, it felt like the characters were reduced to constantly dividing everything and everyone to Indian and non-Indian. Everything. Is the perspective of a Native in North America so limited that all they think about is their cultural identity and what degree of indianness their actions, or their partners, or their words are.
Then there's the obsession with basketball, which takes over so much of the book. I don't know if there's a huge culture of playing basketball among Indian populations in the United States or in that particular region even? However there was definitely too much of it for it to be a metaphor, or a good metaphor at least. And this is coming from someone who actually knows a little bit about basketball, someone who's watched basketball and understands basketball terms. Still, I don't see how these painstaking descriptions tied in with the rest of the plots or character development. It made me think that perhaps it was a game that the author himself played growing up, and so he projected that onto everyone in his book, as if it's a universal truth for all indigenous peoples.
This alone is enough to lower the book's rating but we not even close to all of the reasons why I disliked this book. The main for characters are grown men that act like angsty teenagers. They leap to conclusions (maybe that's what the basketball metaphor was about) and then act on their misguided hunches with violence. There was nothing about these men that I found likable or redeemable, or even unique. All four of these men just sounded and appeared the same. So what was the point after all?
The female characters in the book appear to only be accessories to these male characters, like a canvas that they can project that angst or their ambitions or their guilt upon. Like they were objects, existing purely to justify these men's actions. In fact, it felt like the only reason women or dogs were present in the story was to present us with cruelty and violence and gore. In contrast, at least two of the four main male characters die "off screen", with few details provided to the reader.
And to that end, why were these women or dogs even targeted in the first place? I get the premise of the whole vengeful elk spirit. But why is our elk coming for revenge so many years later, and why are the women and dogs on the receiving end of their most brutal violent deeds? Some of the elk's actions don't make sense either. It is presented as a convoluted vengeance plot, a set up to make the main characters suffer. However, it is so far fetched that you couldn't expect it to work.
For instance,
By the time you slog through the terrible writing, and these terrible characters, and the unjustified violence, and all of the bloody basketball, and the verbal tic that everybody seems to possess no matter where they're from, yeah? The book just completely loses its appeal.