The Death of Bernadette Lefthand.

Davis, Robert Murray

Ron Querry is being called a successor to Tony Hillerman. Both can loosely be described as mystery novelists; both write about Native Americans in the Four Corners area of New Mexico.

Unlike Hillerman, Querry is himself Native American, a descendant of the Sixtown Clan of the Choctaw tribe. But Native American is about as precise a term as European; Choctaw language and customs are very different from those of the Navajo, Apache, Hopi, and Taos tribes, and each of these from the other, as Querry demonstrates quite well. To New Mexican Natives, however, Querry is an Anglo, and his knowledge of them comes from the same sources as Hillerman's: secondary sources (which Querry cites), observation, and imagination. This in no way diminishes the achievement of his very fine novel, The Death of Bernadette Lefthand.

Querry differs from Hillerman in a more important respect: he is not writing a mystery novel. He does interweave melancholy social facts of alcoholism and poverty with the practice of witchcraft, but he does not use Hillerman's conventional mystery point of view, limited third-person omniscience, or the mystery-solution structure.

While the reader knows, from vivid, almost surrealistic passages, who killed Bernadette Lefthand and why, none of the characters in the novel shares that knowledge, least of all the principal narrator. Gracie, Bernadette's sixteen-year-old sister, struggles consciously to tell the story and to come to terms with her sister's death, but she is limited and sometimes naive.

In the novel's larger terms, the limitations do not matter. Gracie understands very well the central facts of being Native American in New Mexico: the vastness of the land and the strength of a coherent culture; the narrow' prospects and the corrosive effects of alcoholism and disease. These are not mysterious, and they admit no easy solution. Neither does Querry seek to impose one.

The Death of Bernadette Lefthand is no more anthropological treatise than mystery. It draws on both genres, but it fuses them into an original and highly effective whole.

This is Querry's third book. The first, Growing Old at Willie Nelson's Picnic, was an anthology. The second, I See by My Get-Up, was a personal memoir of ranch life in eastern New Mexico, written in the language of the American tall tale. This, his first novel, is wholly unlike the first two. It is difficult to predict what course his next book will take, but on the evidence so far, one can say that it will deal with the American Southwest and that it will present a highly original viewpoint in a kind of language very different from that of his other books.

Robert Murray Davis University of Oklahoma