The Lesser Blessed

Richard Van Camp¡¦s novel "The Lesser Blessed" is rooted firmly in the tradition of the coming-of-age, Bildungsroman genre that appeals to all who have survived the teen years and lived to tell about it. Or in this case, lived to read about it. Writing from the sensibility of a Canadian aboriginal artist, a First Nation author speaking from within the experience of life as a member of the Dogrib nation, Van Camp imbues his novel with a definite sense of the indigenous culture situated within the history of Canadian social colonization. His 16-year-old narrator and primary protagonist, Larry, is comfortable with the First Nation culture passed down to him by his family. However, Larry truly finds himself coming alive in the stories told by his mother¡¦s firefighter boyfriend, Jed. As the novel progresses and we discover the dark ¡§devil¡¦s kiss¡¨ secret that weighs so heavily upon Larry¡¦s heart, it becomes increasingly clear that Jed the firefighter is there to save Larry from burning in the flames of guilt and shame. The quenching waters that he offers the tormented teen are his stories, histories and mythologies. Indeed, the chilling influence of Adrian C. Louis and Leslie Marmon Silko is recognizable in this novel at its darkest moments. This is certainly not a childhood story of nostalgia and happiness, but neither is it a tale overwhelmed by sadness and self-destruction. The sharing of stories helps Larry survive the challenges thrown at him as a North American teenager: experimenting with drugs; dealing with bullies; controlling sexual urges; getting into fights; and making friends. Scattered across the pages of almost every chapter is the music of the period, as Larry also draws strength from his favorite band, Iron Maiden. Band names and song titles are peppered throughout the novel. Most post-teenaged readers will probably smile as they remember how very important music was to them as teens. Especially satisfying is Van Camp¡¦s playfulness with language and his creation of a jargon that is both pleasant and jarring, such as the hyper-speech that Larry calls ¡§Raven talk.¡¨ The dialogue is often fast and funny, although the humor tends toward the darker edges of comedy. Most intriguing are the flashes of memory offered up in dreamlike and psychedelic patterns. Watch out for those blue monkeys. If the novel has any failing, it is the brevity of the work. The story takes place in the space of a few weeks, and though ¡§manhood¡¨ or ¡§adulthood¡¨ remain far from Larry¡¦s grasp, he revels in his life experiences and fancies himself lucky to be alive. For the cynical adult reader, Larry's joy represents his naivety; his faith in love seems misplaced. Poor Larry just doesn¡¦t know what kind of mud the world still has in store for him, for us all. But maybe, just maybe, he¡¦ll survive better than the rest of us because he¡¦s got stories, Jed¡¦s stories and his own, to keep him going. Timothy R. Fox Kui Xing: The Journal of Asian/Diasporic

"The Lesser Blessed is a coming of age tale told in photo-booth snapshots and raunchy one-liners. It is poetry and prose and locker-room boasts and puking-your-guts-out shame. It's sex that transcends tragedy. It is loud and rude and high. It's a shaker." --John Burns for the Georgia Straight (Nov. 28, 1996)

"[Van Camp] does not stumble over nostalgia or romanticism or careless diction. He loves words-his own, his Nation's, rock and roll's-and slips perfect ones into atrociously profane and perfect sentences..." --Lorna Jackson for The Malahat Review (Summer, 1997)

The Lesser Blessed. Richard Van Camp. Douglas & McIntyre, 1996. Reviewed by Dr. Geary Hobson. 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

"THE LESSER BLESSED is easily one of the most truthful, painful, powerful novels I've ever read." -Joseph Bruchac