This is the second book I've read written by Momaday. It's also the last I'll read. I just don't like his writing style. Towards the end of the book it took on a different style, less convoluted, less confusing, but it was too little too late. ( )

Momaday's now-famous book has more social and political importance than literary. Like the genre it ushered in, it may have been positive for the writer in general, but often relied upon a cliche racist/anti-racist dichotomy played through vague and often meaningless metaphor.

The author's busy mind has made a complex work, but not one with any central point or in-depth exploration. The 1970s New Age movement was a combination of many different world philosophies, attempting to find some common ground for humanity that might soften the Hegemonic West. Unfortunately, without a rhetorical basis, this movement provided us with mere watered-down generalism.

It is now a popular personal philosophy because it is so vague that it can be used to support any concept and ideal. Momaday falls into this same trap with his erratic and varied text, which started out as a poetic series.

This all ended in Momaday's premature Pulitzer, and he's sat steadfastly on that laurel ever since, and given us no more reason to presume he deserved it. The prize committee was clearly interested in following civil rights with a politically correct investment in 'diversity'. The only problem is that Momaday's work is as fundamentally colonized as Kipling's.

His presentation of 'native' themes and storytelling methods is a fairly thin veil over what is not as much a Native American novel as just an American novel. The Native culture Momaday represented was already overwritten by the dominant western culture.

Though Momaday tried to inject some cultural understanding and 'oral traditions' into his book, in the end it is little more than a descendant of Faulkner's. Not a badly written one, but neither is it focused enough to represent some cultural 'changing of the guard'. ( )

1097 House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday (read 27 Nov 1970) (Pulitzer Fiction prize in 1969) This is a novel by an Indian about an Indian who leaves the reservation, disintegrates, and then returns to it. It is full of writing that sounds like "Creative Writing" and has some true-sounding stuff in it. But on balance, I like writing which is a little clearer as to what is going on. ( )

A bleak depiction of a Native American man struggling to adapt to life in America in the '40s and '50s. The diction here is such that we can apply the words "stark" and "lyrical." The story is told in multiple viewpoints, and for me sometimes it was hard to keep clear who was doing the telling. However, the pain and recovery of Abel, the main character, are the meanest, grittiest, and clearest aspects of the plot. There is an interesting character here who styles himself a sun priest; he's a preacher in L.A. and has a very perceptive take on the difference between creation and the way St. Paul tells it. Eventually he is no help to Abel and although he may have the inclination to help, he does not understand Abel or his problems.

This book is full of wonderful, vast Southwestern imagery, and it is peopled with iconic characters. In the Bible, Abel is murdered, but this Abel is able to return to his roots and reconstruct his house made of dawn. (There is a wonderful description of the sun coming up over the rim of a vast crater, and it's a key image in the book.) Another key here is a song sung by a Kiowa chanter, which grows into a sacred litany of holy and beautiful things. Thus do we see Abel, who gives up trying to change into an Anglo, and takes his position in a long, sacred line of Natives, and eventually reproduces and perpetuates it.

These images and geography are not to my taste, but this is a very well-crafted book. For what it is and what it covers, I do recommend it. ( )

There's a certain kind of Verfremdung or ostraenie or whatever that people tend to bust out when they're trying to give you a peek into the alien mind of the utter Other, the Other that is being presented as different in kind, whether it's the "literal" alien from outer space, or the exoticized racial alien, or what have you. You see it in comic books a lot, and science fiction. Some of its hallmarks appear to be:

-only using declarative sentences;

-lack of access to the subject's thoughts, or more usually, presentation of his thoughts in a profoundly estranging way;

-paying hyperattention to sensory and chemical responses on the part of the alien subject - all the lights are brighter, the wind cuts, the smells are strange, and the subject feels amorphous fear
- whether it's the alien-in-the-familiar like a Predator popping up in New York, or the alien-in-the-alien - like in this book, with Abel the Kiowa out in the mesas - it's not whether it's alien to the subject that matters, but to the reader, and it makes him considerably less than a protagonist really.

So that offended me some at first and seemed a bit Uncle-Tommy on Momaday's part at first, to say nothing of annoying, and exactly the sort of pseudo-sympathetic book about natives that would have won a Pulitzer in 1969, but then I proceeded and there were delights! The amazing description of the hawks hunting and then doing a blood dance on the bodies of their prey, and the talk about us whiteys and how we're enervating, killing ourselves with words. Cool.

And finally you see Abel's story take shape in the words of others and the emotional hollowness left behind in his women and the strangeness left behind by his contact with others, and you can see it as psychodrama, or the dull sad downfall of a drunken Indian, or the translation to philistines, on the Pulitzer committee and beyond, of a great soul. The incredible multipage monologue that fills most of the last half of the book has an epic arc and inevitability, giving Abel his bard - "The Ballad of Abel the Hunter." And you realize the reason he doesn't get to be his own protagonist is because that would be cleaning up the crimes of history. We - whites, settlers - made him into this ludicrous creature. But Momaday rescues him, ennobles him, and in the powerful final passage, frees him to assume his centrality, lets Abel hunt. And he is magnificent. ( )