A review by eleanorfranzen
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko

This tale of the gradual healing of a Laguna Pueblo man with severe PTSD from his time in the Pacific theatre of WWII strikes me as the kind of book it would be very easy to teach to high schoolers. That’s both not a bad thing and a somewhat telling thing. There’s a lot of symbolism (the herd of skinny spotted cows; the physiological trait of being light-eyed and what it means about a person’s ancestry; the role and function of alcohol in mediating between the novel’s characters, particularly Native men who are now-unwanted US Army veterans). There are a lot of parallels: the spiritual sickness of Tayo, our protagonist, and the spiritual sickness of the land in which he grew up, which now contains a mine for the uranium that went into the atomic bomb; the interspersed Native myths about quests to save the people from physical starvation and the efforts of Native healers Ku’oosh and Betonie to save Tayo from emotional starvation. It reminded me sometimes of a less oblique Winter in the Blood or a less self-consciously stylised Cormac McCarthy (the latter mostly in the matter-of-fact descriptions of action within landscape: “That last summer, before the war, he got up before dawn and rode the bay mare south to the spring in the narrow canyon. The water oozed out from the dark orange sandstone at the base of the long mesa. He waited for the sun to come over the hills.”—p. 86). It’s super atmospheric, even if it also seems to contain less plot than its length could hold. I’m not convinced by the ending, in which Tayo’s inaction leads to the death of another Native man at the hands of two more; the idea seems to be that by not resorting to violence, he has reached his cure or salvation, but it seems hard to reconcile to the fact that he might have been able to save a life and chose not to. I would love to read more considered criticism, especially Native criticism, of Ceremony; my edition just has a short, appreciative but not very informative foreword by Larry McMurtry.