Three Generations Woven Loosely Into A Story Of Indian Heritage

May 10, 1987|By Reviewed by Charles R. Larson, Author whose books include ``American Indian Fiction`` and ``Arthur Dimmesdale,`` a novel.

A Yellow Raft in Blue Water

By Michael Dorris

Henry Holt, 343 pages, $16.95

In his analysis of the 1980 census figures, E. J. Kahn noted that of all of America`s disparate ethnic groups, Native Americans had the highest birth rates. If their numbers continued to grow at the same increasing rate, by around the year 2050, Kahn quipped, there might be enough Indians to try to take the country back.

As their numbers have exploded, American Indian writers have also become an increasingly visible force on our literary scene. Within the last year, Louise Erdrich published her second celebrated novel, ``The Beet Queen,``

which was followed by James Welch`s ``Fool`s Crow`` (probably the most imaginative of all of these recent works). Now Michael Dorris (Erdrich`s husband) has published this remarkable, if uneven, novel.

The opening section of ``A Yellow Raft in Blue Water`` is stunning. We enter the world of a 15-year-old girl named Rayona, who is half Indian and half black and is confused and displaced by both of these worlds. Her terminally ill mother, Christine, flees a hospital in Seattle and drives recklessly back to the reservation in Montana. Rayona reluctantly joins her, only to be abandoned by her mother once the two of them reach Christine`s own mother`s house on the reservation. Rayona in turn flees her grandmother, Ida, as soon as she realizes that the old woman is as distant and aloof as Christine has always been.

In the vivid incidents that follow, Rayona forsakes a young priest who attempts to seduce her; gets a job in a Montana state park and lives, temporarily, with a couple who befriend her and provide the filial love she so badly needs; and finally makes a kind of triumphant entry back into the Indian world, disguised as a male broncobuster at a rodeo. Of that moment of fusion with her mother`s heritage, Dorris writes:

``Wheeling and spinning, tilting and beating, my breath the song, the horse the dance. Time is gone. All the ordinary ways of things, the gettings from here to there, the one and twos, forgot. The crowd is color, the whirl of a spun top. The noises blend into a waving band that flies around us like a ribbon on a string. Beneath me four feet dance, pounding and leaping and turning and stomping. My legs flap like wings. I sail above, first to one side, then the other, remembering more than feeling the shapes of our bodies together. Things happen faster than understanding, faster than ideas. I`m a bird coasting, shot free into the music, spiraling into a place without bones or weight.``

Had the narrative ended here, ``A Yellow Raft in Blue Water`` could be regarded as a tightly structured and sometimes brilliant novella. What follows instead--sections narrated by Christine and Ida--offers a number of reversals and surprises, yet they scarcely advance what has already been hinted at in Rayona`s unified tale.

It is possible that all Michael Dorris wanted to convey was the generational differences among his three female narrators and the changes in their worlds. That he does effortlessly. What he bypasses is a sense of larger structure, of tying the knot once he starts braiding the three strands together.