Calling the fifth volume of William T. Vollmann's mammoth Seven Dreams series ambitious--at over 1,300 pages and stuffed with glossaries, maps, sketches and marginalia--is an understatement.
The series--its last addition was 2001's Argall--has dealt with the catastrophic effects European colonization had on Native Americans, and in The Dying Grass Vollmann describes the downfall of the Plains Indians through the eyes of the Nez Perce. The book follows Chief Joseph and his tribe on their long retreat from nemesis General Oliver Otis Howard, from Oregon and Montana to the Canadian border. The scenes in which the Nez Perce outmaneuver the larger pursuing force, and the sense of impending doom as the tribe is cornered, model bravura storytelling tied to a larger historical sense of what the events meant.
Vollmann's supple prose takes on the consciousness of each of his protagonists. The army, with its brute force, is handled with full humanity, and no character emerges as a stock villain. Howard comes across as especially tragic as his compassionate nature is ground under the wheels of his duty. The genocide of native tribes looms bitterly, and when the Nez Perce narrators ruminate on what has been irrevocably lost, their poetry is almost too much to bear: "The berries will now be turning red in the Buffalo Country, where perhaps we shall go/ by way of the Lice-Eaters' lands,/ riding farther from Wallowa, where something once was."
The Dying Grass stands out among contemporary American novels, a fierce grab at lasting greatness that clears with grace every hurdle it dares to leap. --Donald Powell, freelance writer