The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong

"Stephen Graham Jones is someone who crosses boundaries. He crosses genre boundaries. He writes horror fiction . He writes science fiction . His writing flies all over time periods. His work is vastly referential. The Fast Red Road is almost the opposite of the first novel we discussed. Unlike Waterlily , this is not a linear narrative. Stephen Graham Jones says really early on that his character is being broken out of time. It’s really an episodic book. Unlike Deloria, he is not aiming to introduce readers to authentic nativeness. He is undermining narratives about nativeness. The story is like a surreal Western. He has clearly read Vizenor. It’s a road novel. The primary character, Pidgin, whose mother died, is trying to find his father. But the plot is almost like a hallucination. This quest takes him to a rodeo, where he trips out on an anti-spongiform drug that they feed to the cows. The plot goes into these weird funhouse tunnels filled with strange twists and playful references. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Stephen Graham Jones is one of those people for whom authenticity is a dangerous category. In something else he wrote, what he calls “A Letter to a Just-Starting-Out Indian Writer– And Maybe to Myself” he says “be wary of ever allowing yourself to think that your ‘Indian experience’ matters any less than any other Indian’s experience, or any other model of ‘Indian experience.’ That creates hierarchies, which leads to the authenticity shuffle, which is an ugly, ugly dance to do for all the people who really want us to do it. Us doing that dance, it keeps us looking at each other, not the world.” Stephen Graham Jones clearly sees that the market wants American Indian writers to “do the authenticity shuffle.” He insists it’s not necessary. Not every American Indian novel needs to be a trauma drama. These five novels show that indigenous authors are telling all sorts of stories."