Firesticks: A Collection of Stories. - book reviews

With Firesticks, Diane Glancy joins a host of contemporary Native American writers articulating the concerns of mixed bloods who must negotiate the difficult middle grounds implicit in their condition. One of her characters says that an Indian is "A leftover walking in two worlds," and another describes her position as "Not a card-carrying Indian. Not a card-carrying White. But school-teacher, provider, minority, and everything nobody else wanted to be. An Indian because I could synthesize the fragments and live with hurt. Yipes." But however well Glancy represents the mixed-blood condition, that is only one of her achievements in Firesticks.

The volume is a remarkable collection of blurred-genre writing held together by a deep sense of interiority (two-thirds of the stories are controlled by a first-person narrator and little exposition) and by metaphors of flight, postage stamps, constellations, the Tower of Babel, and even antiques. Glancy's artistic range is obvious in the first selections of the book: "The First Indian Pilot" is a traditional short story, "Jack Wilson or Wovoka and Christ my Lord" reads more like a densely poetic personal essay, "The Crosswalk at Galtier Park" is a long narrative poem, and "Firesticks" is a sustained dramatic dialogue. Add to that the very clever homiletic parody in "Initially" and the biblical echoes of the Gospel According to St. John in "Proverb, American" and you have an idea of Glancy's willingness to experiment with form.

Perhaps her most significant experiment is with the novella "Firesticks," which comprises one-third of the volume but is divided into six parts and enfolded into the collection as free-standing yet integrative selections. Turle Heppner, the protagonist of the story, is an independent and gritty woman in the mold of Joy Harjo's Noni Daylight and Luci Tapahonso's Leona Grey. The plot of the story centers on Turle's need to travel from her hometown, Guthrie, Oklahoma, to the town where her father lies dying. In the first two installments of the story, Glancy out-Hemingways Hemingway himself with 11 pages of sustained dialogue containing absolutely no exposition or conversational tags. The proportion of dialogue and exposition varies as the next four sections of the story emerge, and by the last section, the balance has shifted toward the first-person internal narrative of Turle. What strikes me as especially successful about Glancy's method is that the whole process mirrors the way stories are told in real, non-fictive life. Seldom do we hear an entire story from beginning to end in one sitting; we are often drawn into a story through overheard or participatory dialogue and only later do we interpret what has happened. Furthermore, the method reflects a part of Glancy's background, in which the storytelling craft has moved from the oral to the literary only over a period of time. And structurally, the separations in the novella maintain the momentum of the story and serve as a narrative glue for the whole collection.

Glancy's admirable collection is not without weaknesses, however. Both the first and last stories foreground the narrative voices of children, and one wonders why she frames the volume with them since neither shows the ripened maturity and heft of the voices of the middle-aged women in so many of Glancy's other stories. Nonetheless, Glancy's collection is a fine achievement, and her prose is as sharp as the twang of stale water in a tin bucket, but with none of its flatness. As an Indian, Glancy may "walk in two worlds," but as an artist, she is able to "synthesize the fragments." Yipes.

KATHY J. WHITSON Eureka College

COPYRIGHT 1994 Studies in Short Fiction
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