"Without storytelling, human beings don't exist" says Penn's narrator (a "Wyekin" or spirit guide, who, in his comic incopetence reminds me of Ed's Indian spirit guide in TV's "Northern Exposure").
This is the story of Palimony Blue Larue, son of Mary Blue and La Vent Larue, misnamed in the hospital becuase a nurse couldn't imagine anybody naming thier kid "Palomino" after a horse! So Pal goes through life trying to please and be liked as his father before him did, while his mother and her Weyekin spirit guide try to prevent him from making his father's mistakes and teach him how to dream his way out of the white world. His mother didn't want him in their world. Says Mary Blue, "I want him to envision and make a world of his own in which they are not foolish but all their knowledge and instinct don't matter because they don't have any effect."
This must have been the spirit that prompted the famous Ghost Dance.
Pal's mother, Mary Blue, is the spider woman on the set, goddess of wisdom and time, endlessly beading and feeding strangers and friends the way Penelope did - or one of the Fates. She has "...years of her Dreamer's practice at harmony, at the balance that comes from not judging until it's time and even when it became time, ususally not judging the person but maybe the results, and not harshly, which came full circle from the balance achieved by not judging, but putting the thing itself in perspective, by connecting it to five hundred years of human activity and thought, by seeing that very little about real human beings really changes. Once you realize that, once you learn to dream, which helps to create that realization, you gain humor - sometimes, outright laughter - but always the humor that is the resilience of survival."
How much of this is like the Australian aboriginal dreamtime, I wonder?
Pal gradually catches on, but with his own spin. His yellow butterflies become post-it notes by which he dreams his ideal woman, Amanda, into existence. But Amanda does declare towards the end of the book that "I'm real." Not something Pal dreamed. "Dreaming is an imaginative act. But it's very real," he says. "Like telling stories. The Navajo beleive that by articulating something, putting it into words, you actually make it exist. You bring it into being. Dreaming's like that. It makes things exist by imagining them with power. It makes them exist by imagining a world in which they mean a lot."
Pal's epiphany comes when he burns his post-it notes and says they're "dead lectures...names and dates and questions that have to mean what people have already decided they have to mean. Not a single hidden meaning in one of them. Nothing that lets you glimpse the other side of things or look for what's behind or between the words, like stories."
Besides the classical references, there are echoes of other authors in this work - Erdrich and Silko, Anaya and even Alexie - but Penn still has his own voice. He could have used a better editor who would have weeded out sentences such as, "Odd how they don't want their listeners to take part in how their stories make the world, though, isn't it?" which is simplistic at best and patronizing at worst. And you have to connect the dots and pay attention or else you have to go back and check the author's definition of terms. But it's worth it for the world view.
I'm making this work sound like a literary exercise - which it isn't. It's an entertaining story, but you have to pay attention or miss the point. You have to read it to the end to get to the beginning. So it's not light reading. But again, it's worth it.
pamhan99@aol.com
Such questions are gently threaded into a highly imaginative and extremely funny story. The novel shows us the LaRue family, and in particular, son Palimony Blue, whose tale is narrated by a weyekin, or Indian spirit guide, dreamed by his mother Mary. The story works on many different levels. Its structure is highly sophisticated yet unless you are examining it from the perspective of literary criticism (which you can -- this work has won one prestigious award already and will likely be examined in college classrooms, it's that good!) -- you just appreciate the ease with which it joins the stories of Pal's family, his mixblood Indian father, Indian mother, generations of native American ancestors, the story of Pal himself from infant to man, the women in Pal's life, the loves of his life (including his one true love, Amanda) and finally, the hope and promise of the future, the birth of Pal's children. The book shows you, in splendid real-life color, the connections between them all.
Before Pal is able to dream his true love, Amanda, he seeks, finds or thinks he finds, Love in a series of humorous and often lustful encounters along the way with many colorful "strangers". These characters make for a very entertaining story. And, unlike so many books thrown at us today by popular writers, where the characters are `born, drink coffee and die', and whose messages (if any) are momentous in the sense only of, 'of the moment', and don't really matter a whit to life or literature, this book offers in a new and imaginative way some enduring and reassuring messages: that love may really make, not just 'a' difference, but 'the' difference; and we can (and need to try) to hope and dream a better way in this world. Along the way, Dreaming is both an engine that propels us, and a powerful vehicle to create our path and vision. And laughter is, still, wonderful medicine for what ails us.
Also recommended (same author): This is the World (short stories): The Absence of Angels (novel); Feathering Custer (essays); All My Sins Are Relatives; As We Are Now (Editor, essays); The Telling of the World (Native American folk tales)
Young Pal needs help with his dreaming.
Palimony Blue Larue, a mixblood growing up in a small California town, suffers from a painful shyness and wants more than anything to be liked. That's why Mary Blue, his Nez Perce mother, has dreamed the weyekin, the spirit guide, to help her bring into the world the one lasting love her son needs to overcome the diffidence that runs so deep in his blood. The magical (and not totally competent) weyekin pops in and out of Pal's life at the most unexpected times?and in the most unlikely guises?but seems to have difficulty setting him on the right path. Is there any hope for Palimony Blue?
Don't ask his father, La Vent Larue; La Vent is past hope, past help, a city zoning planner and a pawn in the mayor's development plans who ends up crazy and in jail after he shoots the mayor in the?well, never mind. Better to ask Pal's mother, who summons the weyekin when she isn't working on a cradle board for Pal and his inevitable bride. And while you're at it, ask the women in Pal's life: Sally the preacher's daughter, Brandy the waitressing flautist, Tara the spoiled socialite. And be sure to ask Amanda, if you can catch her. If you can dream her.
Using comic vision to address serious concerns of living, Penn has written a freewheeling novel that will surpass most readers' expectations of "ethnic fiction." Instead of the usual polemics, it's marked by a sense of humor and a playfulness of language that springs directly from Native American oral tradition.
What more can be said about a book that has to be read to the end in order to get to the beginning? That Killing Time with Strangers is unlike any novel you have read before? Or perhaps that it is agonizingly familiar, giving us glimpses of a young man finding his precarious way in life? But when the power of dreaming is unleashed, time becomes negotiable and life's joys and sorrows go up for grabs. And as sure as yellow butterflies will morph into Post-It notes, you will know you have experienced a new and utterly captivating way of looking at the world.