Thy People Shall Be My People
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February 9, 1997, Sunday
Thy People Shall Be My People
By Valerie Sayers
CLOUD CHAMBER
By Michael Dorris.
316 pp. New York: Scribner. $24.
The scope of the new novel is ambitious, if not daunting. It tells the
stories of five generations who live in Ireland, Kentucky and Seattle and on a
Montana reservation -- people whose lives are shaped by insurrection (in
Ireland), confinement (to a tuberculosis sanitarium in Kentucky) and
disappearance (into new lives across the country and across the sea). The
dangers of cramming so much into roughly 300 pages are obvious, and I must
confess to having had some misgivings -- despite my admiration for Mr. Dorris's
earlier work -- as I began this account of a family's memories and myths.
The opening chapter is narrated by the matriarch, Rose Mannion (''In every
generation that followed, it is said, there is but one like me''), whose
hyper-romantic voice, close to stereotype, made me nervous. When it became clear
that Rose would be involved in the struggles for Irish freedom, Big Myth alarm
bells rang.
Mr. Dorris pulls off a wise move, however, shifting the novel from grand
passion in Ireland to hard reality in the United States. As he does so, the
first half of the book achieves a striking form, shaped by disease and accident:
the family narrative is continued by Rose's husband, Martin, and her son, Robert
-- both weak men, physically and psychologically -- before it is taken over by
her daughter-in-law, Bridie, and her two granddaughters, Edna and Marcella.
Their history is most effective when composed of shards of memory: the ragged
jumps in the characters' storytelling and the novel's refusal to tidy up their
mysteries are evocative and powerful.
Unlike their father, Edna and Marcella survive tuberculosis (the rich,
compressed descriptions of their time in the sanitarium are among the most
successful of the novel). And what they survive to achieve is, in 1930's
Kentucky, a remarkable cultural merger: Marcella falls in love with the young
black grocer who delivers supplies to the sanitarium. With Edna's help, the
lovers escape, marry and have a son.
This is a resonant notion, one that might have inspired a moving conclusion.
But Marcella's son, Elgin, appears in Mr. Dorris's earlier novel, and serious
credibility problems arise as the two books merge. ''Cloud Chamber'' must
actually undo some of the earlier facts of Elgin's life. More troubling, his
statements about race in this new novel tend to be too abstract and neat --
especially for a black man who's asked to pass as Greek or Italian. (''As a
Negro,'' he tells his mother, ''I can be me.'')
The novel hurtles toward the present. The story ends with Elgin's half-Indian
daughter, Rayona, a smart teen-ager who narrates sections of both novels, and it
is good to be listening to her again. With her sweet, ringing voice, she brings
the novel to an optimistic close. The final scenes, depicting individual
families that have survived bitter power struggles and resentments, suggest that
entire cultures can also overcome the histories that have made them strangers.
Perhaps this is too pretty an ending, but by the novel's end Rose Mannion's
family has been linked to American culture at large, with its recombining ethnic
hyphenations, its changing views of race and history and myth. It seems fair
enough that a story of five generations of people who have stepped outside their
own tribes to embrace others should end on such a clear, high note of hope.
MICHAEL DORRIS is an anthropologist as well as a fiction writer, and his
stories pay particular attention to what happens when American subcultures brush
up against one another. His first novel, ''A Yellow Raft in Blue Water,'' traced
the experiences of three generations of modern American Indian women. ''Cloud
Chamber'' stretches back farther still, to the 19th-century Irish immigrants
whose descendants eventually fall in love with some of the black and Indian
characters in that earlier book.
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