Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

The New Mexico read for my #Reading50States challenge

He could feel it inside his skull — the tension of little threads being pulled and how it was with tangled things, things tied together, and as he tried to pull them apart and rewind them into their places, they snagged and tangled even more. So Tayo had to sweat through those nights when thoughts became entangled; he had to sweat to think of something that wasn’t unraveled or tied in knots to the past — something that existed by itself, standing alone like a deer. And if he could hold that image of the deer in his mind long enough, his stomach might shiver less and let him sleep for a while.

Tayo is a young man of mixed Laguna and white ancestry who has returned to the reservation in New Mexico where he was raised after fighting against the Japanese in World War II. His family and doctors hope that being home will help him heal, but his “battle fatigue” is much more serious than they all expected. He feels more like air than like a person. Now that he’s home, he tries to feel human again. Perhaps a traditional ceremony would help him recover, his loved ones suggest. But how does someone recover when the whole world feels broken and sick?

Ceremony is not a book that holds your hand, and that is one of its strengths. Its stream-of-consciousness narration jumps back and forth between the past and present without warning or explanation, much like the way it feels to remember something intensely in an ordinary moment. This jolting may turn away some readers, but I promise that this book rewards patience. And, despite its less conventional aspects, it’s a very classical story in the Joseph Campbell sense, as a friend mentioned to me recently: the wounded hero, the journey, the wise mentor, the revelation — you know how it goes. The seams of the formula were only barely visible to me while I was reading it, though, because Silko’s pacing elongates many of the moments in between the major plot points. In one scene that I loved, for example, Tayo walks along the canyons and arroyos of his hometown and tries to pray (and investigate for himself what prayer even means), even though he doubts the power of the act. Being equally dedicated to the quiet and loud moments in the plot make the loud moments less expected. I often couldn’t guess what would happen next.

The novel also treats its subject with the moral and aesthetic complexity it deserves. While it is very political and grounded in history (of the theft of Native land, Native American boarding schools, the Eastern theater of the war, nuclear testing, and more), its primary mission isn’t to be a textbook or a rallying cry. Its power comes from describing a historical moment through inventive storytelling — for instance, by interspersing traditional Laguna stories told in verse throughout Silko’s perceptive prose. Her stylistic choices and her morally ambiguous characters make Tayo’s difficult search for a personal and collective sense of justice (and sense of self) so poignant to observe.

It should be required reading for any course on modern American literature, I think!