The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong
Stephen Graham Jones
The Fast Red Road—A Plainsong is a novel which plunders, in a gleeful, two-fisted fashion, the myth and pop-culture surrounding the American Indian. It is a story fueled on pot fumes and blues, borrowing and distorting the rigid conventions of the traditional western. Indians, cowboys, and outlaws are as interchangeable as their outfits; men strike poses from Gunsmoke, and horses are traded for Trans-Ams. Pidgin, the half-blood protagonist, inhabits a world of illusion—of aliens, ghosts, telekinesis, and water-pistol violence—where television offers redemption, and "the Indian always gets it up the ass."Having escaped the porn factories of Utah, Pidgin heads for Clovis, NM to bury his father, Cline. But the body is stolen at the funeral, and Pidgin must recover it. With the aid of car thief Charlie Ward, he criscrosses a wasted New Mexico, straying through bars, junkyards, and rodeos, evading the cops, and tearing through barriers "Dukestyle." "Charlie Ward slid his thin leather belt from his jeans and held it out the window, whipping the cutlass faster, faster, his dyed black hair unbraiding in the fifty mile per hour wind, and they never stopped for gas." Along the way, Pidgin escapes a giant coyote, survives a showdown with Custer, and encounters the remnants of the Goliard Tribe—a group of radicals to which Cline belonged.Pidgin's search allows him to reconcile the death of his father with five hundred years of colonial myth-making, and will eventually place him in a position to rewrite history. Jones tells his tale in lean, poetic prose. He paints a bleak, fever-burnt west—a land of strip-joints, strip-malls, and all you can eat beef-fed-beef stalls, where the inhabitants speak a raw, disposable lingo. His vision is dark yet frighteningly recognizable. In the tradition of Gerald Vizenor's Griever, The Fast Red Road—A Plainsong blazes a trail through the puppets and mirrors of myth, meeting the unexpected at every turn, and proving that the past—the texture of the road—can and must be changed.
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The Fast Red Road is a somewhat trippy contemporary/surreal fiction story that is (as far as I can tell) Stephen Graham Jones’ debut novel, published in 2000.
The story follows Pidgin, an indigenous man who has gotten work in the adult film industry in Utah and ends up going home to Clovis, NM to bury his father. This is the second go-around for him since his father had committed suicide 10 years prior but his body had been donated to science for a local mortician. Now that the body has been released, it’s time for the final funeral. At said funeral, Pidgin deals with grief and complicated family relationships with his uncle, Birdfeather, and his father’s body is stolen by an old comrade and Pidgin has to track it down. Doing so leads to finding out a lot about his father and his long-dead mother and all of the connections they had an underground criminal group of misfits.
To be perfectly honest, this is the kind of story that I would normally never pick up. I don't love contemporary fiction and surrealist even less so I'm not the ideal reader for this one and I ended up reading it because I was participating in a group read of SGJ's stories.
What I did like was the excellent thematic exploration, particularly with grief and family dynamics and identity. There's also some really powerful scenes in terms of imagery and hints of horror among the contemporary/literary elements that really worked for me.
However, the writing style is pretty dense and it's the kind of story that would benefit from either a class or a lot of re-reads/examination to really parse. This is particularly true because there are a lot of allusions and references both classical and cultural that I know went over my head. There were also some fever dream sequences where I had no idea what was happening and didn't really engage my attention.
Overall, like I said, this is definitely a case of a book that just isn't for me. I don't think it's bad but it's not in my wheelhouse and is much better suited to readers who love literary fiction and examining themes and allusions a lot more.
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