The Fast Red Road—A Plain­song is a glee­ful, two-fisted plun­der­ing of the myth and pop– cul­ture sur­round­ing the Amer­i­can Indian. It is a novel fueled on pot fumes and blues, a sur­real pseudo-Western, in which imi­ta­tion is the sin­cer­est form of sub­ver­sion. Indi­ans, cow­boys, and out­laws are as change­able as their out­fits; horses are traded for Trans-Ams, and men are as likely to strike poses from Gun­smoke as they are from Custer’s last stand. Pid­gin, the half-blood pro­tag­o­nist, inhab­its a world of illusion—of aliens, ghosts, telekine­sis, and water-pistol vio­lence, where TV and porn offer redemp­tion, and the Indian always gets it in the end. His attempts to rec­on­cile the death of his father with five hun­dred years of colo­nial myth-making lead him to criss-cross a wasted New Mex­ico, return­ing com­pul­sively to his home­town of Clo­vis, the site of his father’s burial.

Accom­pa­nied by car thief Char­lie Ward, he evades the cops in a top-down drag race, tear­ing through bar­ri­ers “Dukestyle.” The land they travel seems bent with fever—post-apocalyptic —as though the end has arrived and no one noticed. Its occu­pants hawk bod­ies and pas­tel bomb shel­ters, wan­der­ing a bleak hal­lu­ci­na­tion of strip-joints, strip-malls, and all you can eat beef fed beef stalls. They speak a lingo of dis­pos­able nick­names, trun­cated punch lines—slang with an expi­ra­tion date. Pid­gin strays through bar and junk­yards, rodeos and car­ni­vals, encoun­ter­ing the rem­nants of the Goliard tribe. There’s the mys­te­ri­ous Mex­i­can Paiute, Uncle Birdfin­ger, checkout-girl Stiya 6—the rein­car­na­tion of Pidgin’s mother—and media-queen Psy­chic Sally, who pre­dicts the group’s demise. Each plays a part in the search that will even­tu­ally place Pid­gin in a posi­tion to rewrite history.

Jones deliv­ers his stun­ning epic in vio­lent, pal­pa­ble prose, ren­der­ing a dark yet rec­og­niz­able vision. The Fast Red Road 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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