Bad Medicine.
Davis, Robert Murray
Ron Querry. New York. Bantam. 1998. 317 pages. $23.95. ISBN 0-553-09969-8.
Like Ron Querry's first novel, The Death of Bernadette Lefthand
(1993; see WLT 68:2, p. 408), Bad Medicine suspends explanations of
motives and events between white and Navajo views of the universe. In
Lefthand, sociology and psychology were juxtaposed with witchcraft to
explain motive and method in a variation on the murder mystery. In
Medicine, a conscious reworking of the Doomsday bug scenario,
epidemiological explanations of the outbreak of hantavirus on the Navajo
reservation are opposed by Navajo and Hopi views of an imbalance in
nature caused by human ignorance or witchcraft.
Both novels employ multiple viewpoints, but in quite different ways.
In Lefthand, two partly reliable and sympathetic though limited
first-person narrators attempt to make sense of the various
catastrophes. These accounts are supplemented by authoritative
quotations from anthropological works on witchcraft and by an objective,
omniscient narrator who refrains from interpreting. The reader is left
to decide which explanation, white or Navajo, is correct. Medicine is
almost entirely narrated, in the present tense, by an objective and
sometimes cinematic narrator who moves from character to character,
intercutting episodes from various settings and offering full support
for white and Navajo perceptions in turn - and even at once. As a
result, this novel seems far more driven - and far more rapidly - than
Lefthand by situation than by character. The characters are not without
interest, but they are not developed very fully. (Surprisingly, in view
of the well-drawn women in Lefthand, the women characters are the
weakest.)
The main focus of narration in Medicine is Dr. Pushmataha Foster.
Like Querry, he is part Choctaw, interested in and sympathetic to the
Navajo world view but not part of it. However, he seems to have special
abilities, responding to an unspoken summons from a Hopi elder, seeing a
skinwalker or witch, and not only observing but dancing - the
novel's metaphor for continued life - with a ghostly Navajo woman
who died almost two hundred years earlier in a battle with Spanish
soldiers and who in the climax of the novel returns to save the Hopi,
dispose of the Navajo witch, and deliver the epilogue.
The real strengths of the novel are its evocation of the New Mexico
and Arizona landscape, far stronger than in Lefthand or indeed in the
novels of Tony Hillerman, and its secondary Indian characters. At times
they seem almost stereotypically spiritual, but then turn to mundane
things like the superiority of General Motors cars to Fords. And the
minor characters have a sense of humor. One compares the Center for
Disease Control inspectors, dressed in biohazard suits, to those in E.T.
and pulls out a chair, like Buster Keaton in The Pink Panther, to watch
impassively the antics of the whites and incidentally make a dollar by
selling food and jewelry.
Bad Medicine shows that Ron Querry is capable of working with
familiar material - the Four Corners area of the Southwest and its
inhabitants - in new and exciting ways. With these two novels, he has
established himself not merely as successor but as rival to Tony
Hillerman.
Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma
