Book Reviews

Men on the Moon: Collected Short Stories

University of Arizona Press; $35 hard, $17.95 paper

In the most powerful of Simon J. Ortiz's stories from Men on the Moon, there's always an experience that's just beyond his characters' grasp: a vaguely remembered song, an inscrutable gesture, a half-understood compulsion to make offerings to the dead. Ortiz, a native of Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, molds stories from the echoes of Southwest pueblo life still heard behind the hum of contemporary American culture. But the best of these stories are not regional; they are about all of us, the struggles we endure to maintain connection to our communities and ourselves. In reading these stories, we sense, as Ortiz knows in his bones, that much of our cultural narcissism is derived not from self-love but from self-loathing, a hatred of our own emptiness; we have hollow places to fill. And like many of Ortiz's characters, we often fill them with alcohol, violence, and self-deception. But like them, we also sense something better in the periphery.

In one story, when a neighbor's young son, Slick, is killed in Vietnam, a character hands the neighbor, who is not Native American, an offering of tobacco, feathers, and sticks wrapped in cornhusk. ""It's for [Slick's] travel from this life among us to another place of being. -- It's for all of us, this kind of way -- you put them somewhere you think you should, someplace important that you think might be good, maybe to change life in a good way, that you think Slick would be helping us with.'" This same feeling, that a more substantial life is partially hidden from us, pervades the understated title story as well. On Father's Day, a grandson demonstrates the wonders of TV for his grandfather, Faustin. They watch one of the Apollo moon flights:

Are those men looking for something on the moon, Nana? he asked his grandson.

They're trying to find out what's on the moon, Nana. What kind of dirt and rocks there are. -- The men are looking for knowledge. --

Faustin wondered if the men had run out of places to look for knowledge on the earth. Do they know if they'll find knowledge? he asked.

They have some already. They've gone before and come back. They're going again.

Did they bring any back?

They brought back some rocks. ...

Rocks. Faustin laughed quietly. The American scientist men went to search for knowledge on the moon and they brought back rocks. He kind of thought that perhaps [his grandson] was joking with him.

Simon Ortiz is regional in the same sense that Faulkner is, and like him, Ortiz values the storyteller's collaboration with the listener, values a shared vision for what was and could be; mere telling isn't enough. And in the best stories in Men on the Moon, we experience characters' interior spaces that still resonate, however faintly, with the sounds of this shared life.