Tehano

Once you declare a novel brilliant, you may as well stop. But you have to go on, a while, at least, because almost every book published is declared brilliant in print, by someone, eventually. Same problem with masterpiece. Tehano is brilliant, a masterpiece. Unique is perhaps more useful and alluring--Tehano is all that. And more. Once you have gone this far, what you can possibly go on to say is something under every heading--character, narrative, meaning. All three are brilliant, masterful, unique. This above all, Wier's style is a singular achievement in our time [say, 100 years, since 1910]. His style, line by line, invokes a muttering "Wish I had written that line." The neglect of this novel by critics stuns me, as Melville's few readers were stunned when MOBY DICK first appeared. Now I am getting steamed, so I will quit, after these two words: "Read Tehano." David Madden

A wonderful read - an imagined world full of vividly realized characters, places, and stories. I say stories because there are four major story lines and several minor ones, all of which play out between Manhattan and Matamoros, Mexico in the latter part of the Civil War and the early postwar years. The characters include soldiers and ex-soldiers both Blue and Gray running from the war, native Americans under siege once the war no longer occupied the whites, slaves escaping their masters, and multitudes of Midwestern farmers, speculators, and freebooters of all kinds looking for a new start or a quick killing. This is multistranded historical fiction in the tradition of Annie Dillard, Larry McMurtry, and Charles Frazier: storytelling that pays close attention to landscapes and to the vernacular, everyday customs, and artifacts - in a word, the culture - of the people. The experience of reading TEHANO is like tuning a guitar, with the various story lines constituting the strings. When you put on new strings, you start out with a lot of slack, so you can wind the string several times around the tuning gear to make the string hold tight. As you twist the tuner and the wire pulls taut, you begin to hear a tone, a pitch, and the tighter you wind the wire, the clearer and more focused the tone. As you do this string after string, each one makes its own sound, but it's unclear for awhile how the individual sounds cohere. The last step is the final tuning, when you adjust the strings to each other, bringing each one into relationship with the others so that the ensemble creates a harmonious whole. The novel had that kind of effect on me, with the various "strings," after having been slowly tightened during the first 600 pages, finally becoming aligned and tuned together in the last 100 or so pages. At the end, I felt I was indeed holding a finely tuned instrument.

Tehano is a fascinating book that's difficult to describe in a brief review. It reflects both the early twenty-first century in which the author lives and the mid-nineteenth century that he describes. Tehano's graphic portrayals of sex and violence, its insistence that all cultures can justify their own brutalities on their own terms, and its refusal to draw easy, totalizing moral conclusions make it seem contemporary indeed. But its affection for individual characters, its delight in the storytelling impulse, and its combination of intricacy and accessibility remind me of much nineteenth-century fiction. It's a sprawling novel, with about twenty major characters and hundreds of minor ones. If you like to get lost in a book--to have the experience that you're no longer reading words and sentences, but that you're directly apprehending a world at least as real as the one that you inhabit on an everyday basis--then I think you'll spend an enjoyable week with Tehano. Major details about setting, plot, and characters are readily available, so I won't repeat them here. I'll just add that the book contains several "character transformations" that are surprisingly convincing: my favorites are the young, uncertain Dorsey Murphy who becomes the self-assured Blood Arrow, wife of Wahatewi; and the conniving, red-haired Orten Trainer who re-invents himself as the scalped, tongueless, authentically pious Preacher Orten.

From the moment I began reading Allen Wier's TEHANO, I was struck by the sheer immensity of the research that went into this tale's telling. Wier is able to include historical, biblical and ethnographic scholarship that informs all levels of his narration, thus making for a rich reading experience, but none of this ever gets in the way, is never obtrusive. There is a strong and sure realism at work here, but not the hyper-realism of some such as Robbe-Grillet, for example, and Wier never loses his perspective with it, whether he is giving the reader an overview from a hawk's vantage point, or a close-up in miniature of two people in love, tribes in battle or any one of the many meetings, partings and diremptions which mark the fate of many characters in the book. Just as he handles the human condition with balance and insight and compassion, Wier also manages to keep the reader cognizant of larger forces at play, of the Civil War and slavery, of Westward expansion 'Manifest destiny' and, for many characters, an almost reflexive genocidal impulse. TEHANO is written with a respect for story telling and a reverence for the West and I think Allen Wier's achievement here, beyond the book's scope and ambition, is a seamless melding of history and literature sewn together with such skill it is hard to find a flaw in the skein. The end of the book, which does as one reviewer suggested, come so soon, is never telegraphed and involves some genuinely masterful and intricate choreography that gives the narrative the shape of a river flowing from headwaters to mouth, expanding here, constricting there, coming finally to that place where it can no longer contain all the creatures in its wake. There is great violence, great compassion and great humanity here, the work of a thoughtful writer who still believes in the virtues of strong-telling through strong narrative.

You need this book. As a reader and a bibliophile, I promise that you will not be disappointed. Before you even begin to read, the heft of the book assures you of many happy hours. It is a satisfying size that promises days spent in the past. The tintype photos on the front provide realism and ask to be decoded. The colors of the jacket and cover are of the Old west's worn saddles and Victorian wallpaper, and the creamy pages and font hearken back to cowboy times when people read the long evenings away. I taught myself to read when I was three and picked books thereafter for their size because I felt so bereft when my time with the characters was through. In seventh grade, I read all that Dickens had to offer and have searched since for that same feeling of being caught up with people and being surprised at every chapter with new connections and harrowing adventures for my favorites. This book took me back to those delicious afternoons when I had nothing to do but read and could stay with my new friends until the end, laughing, crying, and shaking with fright until they were safely home. Although the tale is epic, the big plot moves in ever smaller spirals as the characters meet each other. There is an intimacy and a believable quality to the intersection of these disparate lives. It would be tempting for an author, in the grand sweep of such a plot to focus on events rather than flesh out the characters, but these characters are drawn with satisfying detail. Each chapter is written with the finely honed care of a short story where economy of words is necessary, yet the reader will know the people well after the first introduction of each. The minor characters are a delight and often provide humor and respite from the more intense action. They are as carefully crafted as the major characters and certainly as memorable. You will be able to see and hear these people long after you put the book down. The intricacy of the plot is easily followed because of a character list with short descriptions, chapter headings and subheadings, and the connecting thread of Gideon the undertaker's journal. The theme of twin ship is threaded throughout as well as the idea of freedom, not just from slavery but from parental expectation, social convention, and personal demons from the past. The reader does not have to wait for the ending to view redemption. Small victories are sprinkled throughout. A particularly poignant chapter describes two escaped slaves, Knobby and Elizabeth, viewing the ocean for the first time. Never having left the plantation, they are baptized in the waves and healed by the salty water as they speak marriage vows to each other. The large cast of characters provides favorite moments for each type of reader. You will find romance, battle, action, history, mystery, family drama, faith, fables, domestic fiction, slave narrative, and travelogue. The sensual detail used for even the minor events provide a sumptuous feast. The author has u