The Lesser Blessed [Paperback]

In virtually every generation, in the realm of literary activity, there comes along a
book that, by the very nature of its subject matter and place and the sheer exuberance
of its utterances reverberant of the place and people depicted, introduces not only a
little-known terra firma and people, but sometimes becomes the definer of that era in
which it is produced. Not surprisingly, these books are usually the products of younger
writers. Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, Jane Austin's novels, the
work of the Brontes, Stephen Crane's stories, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises
ushering in the Lost Generation, Kerouac's Beat Generation introduced in On The
Road, Salinger's Holden Caulfield wandering through Catcher in the Rye, the jaded
"me"-obsessed teens in Bret Easton Ellis's Less Than Zero, Native American
sensibilities in Momaday's House Made of Dawn, and a generation later, Alexie's The
Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven-all these books and writers burst forth
in such dynamic ways that not only defined their respective eras, shook the accepted
literary standards of their day, but expanded and extended the English lan-{78}guage,
while at the same time occasioning the debut of sometimes extraordinary new literary
talents.
In my view, Richard Van Camp, a Dogrib Nation writer born in Fort Smith,
Northwest Territories, Canada, in 1971, is accomplishing virtually the same thing in his
first novel, The Lesser Blessed, as Hemingway, Kerouac, et al. did in their times.
Given the smaller spectrum of Native American literature within (or without, as many
Native writers would have it) the larger context of American, British, and Canadian
literatures, Van Camp's novel introduces a new terrain and language that nonetheless
has roots in the fiction of Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and James Welch, while
simultaneously exploring the same subject matter as the contemporary stories of
Sherman Alexie, Adrian Louis, and Lorne Simon.
In The Lesser Blessed, a Dogrib Indian teenager named Larry Sole narrates his
story and thus invites the reader into the little-examined world of contemporary Dogrib
(a part of the Dene, or Athabaskan-based, tribal people of the Northwest Territories
of Canada). More specifically, Larry embodies a modern Indian teenager's view of his
particular tribal culture and of the Indian world in general, acknowledging them and
appreciating them along with his fondness for Iron Maiden, Bruce Springsteen, Ozzy
Osbourne, occasional pot-smoking, getting "hamburgered" ("Raven" talk--Larry's own
take on his tribe's trickster figure's language for "drunk," Larry tells us), and trying to
get closer to his own particular Juliet (and, incidentally, the girl's actual name in the
novel) whom Larry remembers as "the first girl in grade school to swear at a teacher."
A North of 60 Romeo, Larry is in love with Juliet while she throws her sexual favors
to Johnny Beck, Larry's best friend, who is scornfully casual to her attentions.
Van Camp's method of characterization is strikingly vivid. At seventeen, and tall
and skinny, Larry describes himself as having "spaghetti arms and daddy longlegs,"
and at one point he visualizes himself as a Dogrib hunter of an earlier time as he
watches Juliet, "seen in his sights as a white caribou, pure, but (whom) he let go out of
respect and awe." Larry and his mother, a night school student at Arctic College, live
in Fort Simmer, a north-of-the-60th parallel town near the border of Alberta. Jed, his
mother's on-again, off-again boy friend, is a traditional Slavey Indian trapper whom
Larry identifies as a father-figure, and who promises to take Larry out "on the land" for
a season of trapping. Larry is amenable to this, but he is still comfortable in his
high-school world of hanging out with Johnny, lusting after Juliet from afar, {79} trying
his best to avoid the numerous school-ground fist-fights, and playing his tape deck
"cranked up" with AC/DC, Judas priest, and Iron Maiden.
Slowly, through a number of finely crafted, fragmented flashbacks, the reader
learns of Larry's past, in which his biological father physically and sexually abused him
and later died in a cabin fire that Larry himself may have started. Like Welch's
emotionally frozen nameless narrator of Winter in the Blood, Larry gradually awakens
to love and affection--after he surprisingly (to himself most of all) consummates his
sexual desire for Juliet in a brief relationship--and learns to retrust his mother and to
give himself fully in a father-son relationship with Jed. The Lesser Blessed, incredibly
funny and wise-cracking in many places, is nonetheless filled with the genuine
ingredients of a well-wrought tragi-comedy.
The Lesser Blessed is also the harbinger of a sophisticated Arctic literature, and
of a bold new direction for contemporary Native literature. And while it is perhaps not
the first novel to come out of the Canadian Northwest Territories, it is certainly the first
work of fiction by a Native writer from that vast region. By all accounts, it is a
masterful achievement.

Dr. Geary Hobson