Watermelon Nights

The hypnotic nature of Sarris's story-telling is due, in part, to the way in which the plot unfolds in reverse, unwinding backward through time in layers of lost memory and meaning. In Part One of the novel, a young mixed-blood Pomo Indian man named Johnny Severe threatens to leave his ancestral homeland behind while struggling to define his own evolving sexual, moral, and tribal identity. In Parts II and III, Johnny's mother and grandmother re-tell Johnny's story--and the story of the Waterplace Pomo people--from their own radically different perspectives in historical time. Their stories are sometimes harsh, sometimes haunting, often hilarious and ultimately hopeful. Taken together they hold the keys not only to Johnny's survival, but to the survival of the Waterplace Pomo people as well.

Though few in numbers, the Pomo people of Northern California are widely regarded by anthropolgists and art collectors as among the greatest basket-weavers on earth. Priceless collections of Pomo basketry are held in major public and private collections worldwide. With similar artistry, Greg Sarris weaves the separate voices of his three main characters into the whirling pattern of a single narrative, a hypnotic tale in which the lives of the characters tangle and intertwine.

The tightly woven multi-vocal nature of this novel makes for challenging reading. Those who want their Indian stories sugar-coated are better off renting Disney's Pocahontas cartoon. Like Johnny, the reader is forced to combine and compare the various conflicting versions of a painful past described like a puzzle to be pieced together, a mystery story to be solved. But the reward for the effort is far deeper and more memorable than any Kevin-Costner-in-a-loincloth version of Native American history could possibly provide. Hidden in the warp and weave of this novel are clues not only to Johnny's place in modern America, but to our own shared history as well. After reading Sarris's work, you'll never see the landscape of California the same way again.

Readers familiar with Sarris's earlier book Grand Avenue (the basis of the award-winning HBO mini-series) will find themselves at home here: many of the same characters and conflicts subtley reappear. Yet by avoiding the trendy nihilism of so much contemporary fiction, Sarris transcends the boundaries of his own previous work, wresting both meaning and magic from the harsh lives of his characters. In the end he gives Johnny the most precious gifts of all: the gift of self-knowledge; the gift of love; the gift of survival.

With these gifts, Watermelon Nights places Greg Sarris at the forefront of a new generation of emerging Native American writers. As a native-born California writer, Sarris also inherits the legacy of an earlier generation of California authors, from John Muir to John Steinbeck to Wallace Stegner, who helped to place the California landscape at the center of America's moral imagination, a part of what Stegner aptly called the "geography of hope."