Winter in the Blood (Penguin Classics)

It's been several years since I've read this book, but what I remember is walking away from it very satisfied and impressed. Enjoy.

This is one of the most moving, one of the most touching books about the American West that I know. From the incredible first paragraph right to the last sentence, this is an important story of a young man living somewhere between the world of his Native American ancestors and the mean streets of the modern American West. I've read and read the book many times, yet several scenes always catch me off guard with their beauty and emotional power. And as I read those sections, I still discover tears running down my cheeks. Jim Welch was a friend of mine. He was a beautiful and very kind man who always had time for young writers who were trying to learn their craft. I can still hear his voice, and I miss him all the time.

Written by American-Indian author James Welch, Winter in the Blood portrays a thirty two year old American-Indian man who lives on a reservation in Montana with his mother. He engages in no activities that you could term truly heroic -- he works on his family farm, gets into a bar fight in town, has one-night stands, becomes a partner with strangers in crime. What distinguishes this novel is how it gives us a view of the `American Experience' through non-white eyes. It is meant to be an authentic portrait of American Indian life in the late twentieth century; it is like a painting of the American West that is evocative of certain mood and of a certain time and place, but which does not convey anything very profound.

The prose is earthy, gritty in style. I found it to be the best, most enjoyable part of the novel. The style is simple in a very matter-of-fact way -- it can be funny, crude, or emotionally stirring, but it is like this simply as a matter of relating things as they strike the protagonist (for instance, there is a part where he says that once he shot his neighbor's dog solely because he "was drunk and it was moving.") The prose manages to be evocative without demonstrating that the author knows how to use a thesaurus, exhibiting a skillful expressiveness executed with an economy of means. What's appealing about this novel is no so much what the protagonist does as it is the gripping means with which the scenes are conveyed.

The main character, however, is not well developed; most of the secondary characters are more fleshed out and more compelling than the protagonist himself. (True enough, though, this novel is more about the environment the central character is in than about the protagonist himself.) The dialogue can be confusing, at times you can lose track of which lines of dialogue belong to which character. It is difficult to say exactly what this novel is about; the protagonist makes a few cracks about being in a white man's world and about this "greedy stupid country", but none of this forms into any coherent political diatribe, nor do the actions the protagonist takes or the events that occur to him gain any significance in this light. He merely does stuff, which can be either funny or picturesque, but which has little meaning apart from the actions themselves.

This is not to say that Winter in the Blood is not on the whole enjoyable, for I found it so. It has enough virtues to make it a worthy read. It paints an eye-catching snap-shot of modern American Indian life.

James Welch is probably Montana's foremost Native American writer, and this wonderful novella is evidence of considerable talent. Published 30 years ago (1974), it takes place in the shadow that was cast by the nation's approaching bicentennial. While neither bitter nor angry, it manages anyway to portray a country that has little to show for itself but "greed and stupidity." The values it embraces are finally those available to every American, native or otherwise - compassion and respect for life and the living.

The story concerns a few days in the life of a 32-year-old man, descendant of Indians and living in two worlds, his mother's home on the reservation and the dreary bars and hotels of nearby Havre and Malta, Montana. His days and nights blending together in an alcoholic haze, he meets a deranged white man, picks up women and gets punched in the nose. Meanwhile, he is haunted by a past that includes the death of an older brother and an injury to his knee that multiple operations have not remedied. Out of these unpromising circumstances, Welch finds the beginnings of a kind of personal salvation. By reaching back through the memory of a blind old man's act of charity, he restores the younger man's vision of himself.

Among the ranks of modern Native American writers, such as Louise Erdrich, Welch opens up a world for non-Indian readers that goes well beyond the usual stereotypes. His Indians are strikingly individual, absorbed in the everyday, motivated as much by self-interest and cock-eyed notions as their white counterparts. In Welch's hands, a conversation among five of them can be as comic and absurd as Ionesco. Meanwhile, the Native American past is there to ground a person with a sense of purpose and identity. For all its sorrows, Welch's story is finally a joy to read.

Winter in the Blood was a good piece of Montana literature. It told a believable story of the life of a man living on the Blackfoot Reservation. It was interesting to read about how his brother and father died and how he ended up living there. The things that happened to him were interesting too. Like how he could go all the way to Havre just to find a woman who stole a couple things of his. The downside of the book was that it's kind of slow in some spots but not so much spots that the book just makes you want to stop reading it.