THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 23, 1997 TAG: 9702180455
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY AUDREY KNOTH
LENGTH: 77 lines
CLOUD CHAMBER
Scribner. 320 pp. $24.
Our nation has traditionally been called a melting pot. In truth, it is a cloth - a whole woven from myriad, and disparate, threads. This notion comes alive in the novel Cloud Chamber, which traces a lineage through five generations. Author Michael Dorris begins his tale in late 19th-century Ireland and finishes it on a Montana Indian reservation in the 1990s. In so doing, he knits the African-American, Native American and Anglo-American experiences into one family.
At the start of Cloud Chamber, strong-willed Rose Mannion falls in love with a man who reveals himself to be a British sympathizer. She gives him up to the Resistance and coerces local barkeep Martin McGarry into marrying her and accompanying her on a dramatic journey to America. They settle in Kentucky where they raise two boys, one Rose's son by her lover, and the other her son by Martin. A daughter-in-law enters the story, marrying one of the sons and loving the other; one of her daughters marries Earl Taylor, who is African-American; and their son Elgin marries a Native American and has a daughter, Rayona.
At the end of the book, Rayona comes to terms with her identity by undergoing a Native American naming ceremony. As she looks around at her relatives, she realizes the significance of family. ``I make them, allow them to be them, and in return they make me me. . . . Without them, without their opinions and their rules and their shocked reactions, free, who would I be?''
While Cloud Chamber neatly demonstrates the weaving together of a family over the generations, the novel is especially effective for the thoughts and feelings revealed by the people along the way. It is told as a series of first-person narratives, so the characters are more than just limbs on the family tree - they're individuals with their own compelling stories.
For instance, there's Edna, granddaughter of Rose Mannion and great-aunt of Rayona, who loses her young years to her struggle with tuberculosis. Never married, she becomes a clerical worker. She briefly considers, then decides against, entering a convent. Such a character could easily be portrayed as drab. But Edna has a rich imagination, clearly displayed in a passage in which she stands on the deck of a ferry, headed for the Midwestern religious house that she's considering joining.
``I had thought Lake Michigan was big when I saw it in Chicago. It had waves, and there was a horizon line straight as a ruler. But somehow it seemed tamer than Superior. With Michigan you could make out both sides. It was like seeing the bottom of a teardrop or a beaker. The water sort of sloshed. Superior was more like the sky turned on its end. It took up half of everything, seemed bigger and wider than the land that tiptoed against it on the shore we had just left. Before us, its tides rolled with the weight of long momentum. We could be shipping off to anywhere, anywhere at all.''
And there's the sensitive Elgin, whose father, Earl Taylor, is reported drowned while serving in the military overseas. Elgin is brought up by his mother, his aunt and his grandmother, and he offers perspective on being a male in a house of females.
``Among the women who raised me there was a constant hum, a buzz of mutual affirmation or longstanding feud. Even the most mundane pronouncement was greeted with incredulity - `There's a white sale at Kauffman's.' `Really?!' - and gasps of amazement. No silence was permitted to penetrate their exchanges. Rather, words and sounds overlapped the evenings like shingles on a roof, crating a solid wall in which difficult thought, true controversy, contemplation, could find no port of entry. . . . I yearned for toughness, unbending views. I imagined such things existed among men, but I know no men well enough to insert myself into their company and learn otherwise.''
Dorris has written acclaimed nonfiction, short stories and children's fiction, as well as Crown of Columbus, co-penned with his wife, noted novelist Louise Erdrich. He links Cloud Chamber to his well-received debut novel, Yellow Raft in Blue Water. Rayona, the young woman whose narrative concludes this new work, is a central character in the eariler novel. But it is not necessary to have read Yellow Raft in Blue Water to appreciate this one. Though a decade has passed since its publication, Dorris shows with Cloud Chamber that he hasn't lost his touch. MEMO: Audrey Knoth is a free-lance writer and executive director of
public relations at Goldman & Associates in Norfolk.