The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Hotline Healers by Gerald Vizenor
Siobhan Senier

Gerald Vizenor. Hotline Healers. Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1997. 172 pp. $21.95.

Casting about to describe Hotline Healers, one might say it’s a little postmodern, a little magic realist, a little picaresque, a lot parodic, an American Indian trickster story—or “tricky story,” as its narrator likes to say as he recounts the exploits of his cousin, Almost Browne, and the rest of the highly extended family who inhabit a fabulous barony on Minnesota’s White Earth Reservation. Readers familiar with Vizenor’s other fiction, poetry, and essays will recognize and revel in much of this novel’s vocabulary—the language of “manifest manners,” “cultural dominance,” teasing, chance, survivance, motion, and native sovereignty—and not a few of its characters—including mongrels who follow, drive (as in chauffeur), and have sex with the human figures. Readers not familiar with Vizenor or with academic Native studies or with the rich diversity of American Indian literatures are in for an often-bewildering, hilarious trip: Almost and his cousin’s enterprises selling blank books (which they brazenly autograph: Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Steinbeck, Maxine Hong Kingston); the hero’s commencement speech for the University of California’s Transethnic Studies Department—an ironic and incendiary performance that throws the audience into “academic hissy fits”; an eighteen-minute taped conference (now lost) in which Richard Nixon offers Almost the vice presidency if he can get the Indians to overthrow Fidel Castro; an Indian princess pageant that the sexily dressed Almost wins by lip-synching Peggy Lee’s “Fever”; and an account of the Manabosho Curiosa, an antiquarian manuscript containing stories of sexual conversion of monks with animals. Vizenor’s writing is odd and elusive, not merely because it’s postmodern or sometimes insiderish (the parades of famous scholars are dizzying). It is elusive also because it is quite pointedly searching for ways to tell Native stories when American audiences are so primed to consume and appropriate all things Indian—when, perhaps like Almost’s university audience, readers are “poised to hear the litanies of native creation and victimry” and thus unable to hear anything else, including the humor. Perhaps the narrator’s description of that commencement speech best describes Vizenor the author: “he was bound to tease the very sacred denials of transethnic dominance and nationalism.
. . . He was timely, and the tone of his voice was rich and dramatic, but he turned and traced words and sentences in such an ironic manner, his tease of survivance, that no one could be sure what he meant.” [Siobhan Senier]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Hotline Healers by Gerald Vizenor Siobhan Senier Gerald Vizenor. Hotline Healers. Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1997. 172 pp. $21.95. Casting about to describe Hotline Healers, one might say it’s a little postmodern, a little magic realist, a little picaresque, a lot parodic, an American Indian trickster story—or “tricky story,” as its narrator likes to say as he recounts the exploits of his cousin, Almost Browne, and the rest of the highly extended family who inhabit a fabulous barony on Minnesota’s White Earth Reservation. Readers familiar with Vizenor’s other fiction, poetry, and essays will recognize and revel in much of this novel’s vocabulary—the language of “manifest manners,” “cultural dominance,” teasing, chance, survivance, motion, and native sovereignty—and not a few of its characters—including mongrels who follow, drive (as in chauffeur), and have sex with the human figures. Readers not familiar with Vizenor or with academic Native studies or with the rich diversity of American Indian literatures are in for an often-bewildering, hilarious trip: Almost and his cousin’s enterprises selling blank books (which they brazenly autograph: Isaac Bashevis Singer, John Steinbeck, Maxine Hong Kingston); the hero’s commencement speech for the University of California’s Transethnic Studies Department—an ironic and incendiary performance that throws the audience into “academic hissy fits”; an eighteen-minute taped conference (now lost) in which Richard Nixon offers Almost the vice presidency if he can get the Indians to overthrow Fidel Castro; an Indian princess pageant that the sexily dressed Almost wins by lip-synching Peggy Lee’s “Fever”; and an account of the Manabosho Curiosa, an antiquarian manuscript containing stories of sexual conversion of monks with animals. Vizenor’s writing is odd and elusive, not merely because it’s postmodern or sometimes insiderish (the parades of famous scholars are dizzying). It is elusive also because it is quite pointedly searching for ways to tell Native stories when American audiences are so primed to consume and appropriate all things Indian—when, perhaps like Almost’s university audience, readers are “poised to hear the litanies of native creation and victimry” and thus unable to hear anything else, including the humor. Perhaps the narrator’s description of that commencement speech best describes Vizenor the author: “he was bound to tease the very sacred denials of transethnic dominance and nationalism. . . . He was timely, and the tone of his voice was rich and dramatic, but he turned and traced words and sentences in such an ironic manner, his tease of survivance, that no one could be sure what he meant.” [Siobhan Senier]

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