BY GREG LANGLEY Books editor
Diane Glancy has consistently produced novels of achingly beautiful prose that is near-poetry. Glancy, who is a professor in the English department of Macalester College in Minnesota, has established herself as a major voice in both Native American writing (she is Cherokee) and in women's fiction.
The body of Glancy's work is impressive. In novels - Pushing the Bear: A Novel of the Trail of Tears, The Cold and Hunger Dance, Flutie - and in plays War Cries: A Collection of Plays - in poems - Iron Woman, Offerings: Poetry and Prose - in short stories - Trigger Dance, Firesticks, Monkey Secret -and in essays - The West Pole, Claiming Breath - Glancy has explored the Native American dilemma of living in one culture while carrying the heritage of another. She has invented a cast of troubled characters who populate her short stories, plays and novels and try. to make sense of modernity while keeping an ear open to the voices of the past.
Many of Glancy's characters are in conflicted situations. They're poor, they're uneducated, they don't understand white society. Or they're rat poor, they're welleducated and assimilated into white society but can't resist the internal pull of tribal memories: Glancy's voice is always underlain with a calm certitude, however, which perhaps reflects her own deep Christian faith These characters are troubled, but there is grace in their lives, and they are working things through.
In her latest book, The Voice That Was in Travel (University of Oklahoma Press; $19.95,128 pp.), Glancy again explores the familiar terrain of the world of Native American culture. This time she employs more figurative, symbolic language to convey the elusive abstractions that set Native American culture and belief apart from those of mainstream America. The 20 stories and novellas share a theme: travel. In "Road;" an Oklahoma woman, Carleen,.travels between the homes of her daughters in Kansas and Missouri, unable to settle in one spot, to stem her-journey. Even when she is at rest for a brief spell, she watches travel programs on television. On one of these programs she sees a haunting image from Africa.
"The little elephant who couldn't stand was bigger than any calf the commentator, had seen. He'd been cramped in the womb with his legs under him. He couldn't straighten his front legs. He'd rub his knees raw trying to walk that way and they'd get infected. And the little elephant couldn't stand. He'd still fall over when he'd try to reach his mother for her milk."
The image of the little elephant walking on bent knees is sharply evocative of the penitent approaching a church altar. The image speaks to Carleen, she mulls it over while driving traveling. Carleen is divorced, hardly gets along with her daughters for more than a day at a time, she has a boyfriend "who wasn't as adventurous as she was," but she is a believer. "Faith was more a companion that her husband had ever been."
That's not to say Glancy's stories culminate in saccharine happy endings. Carleen remains unsure what to do about all her problems.
"Carleen felt brittle as leaves about to fall. Maybe she'd walk only a short time in the history of the upright, then return to her bed like a an old aunt or a sick child. And her spirit would separate to her maker like the interchanges on the highway. The forks in the road. The bypasses."
In "Parachute Rocket w/Flare," Glancy gives readers a Native American fireworks salesman/manufacturer who sees a metaphor for his own world in the brilliant pyrotechnic displays. "Ozmo saw the year as a wheel with July Fourth on top. The other months moved toward it or away from it. Yes. July Fourth was the pinnacle. In autumn, the earth was lit with the flames of red and yellow leaves. The snow, the few times it fell in Arkansas, was the ash and fallout from last summer's fireworks. The earth was full of Ground boomers on its way to the Fourth again."
In "America's First Parade," a Cherokee woman descended from survivors of the Trail of Tears finds her life haunted by spirits of her ancestors who run headlong into her contemporary life. "What had the ancestors thought when a truck picked them up? Did they know they'd stepped into the next world?"
Glancy's writing is filled with evocative images, profound symbolism, poetic renderings. This book is at once a challenge and a joy to readers.