Slow Bear by Anthony Neil Smith: A Book Review

 

Since the quarantine, I’ve found myself reading more cop procedurals than I ever have. It started with John Guzlowki’s Little Altar Boy (reviewed here) and was followed up by Chris Geier’s Silt (reviewed here) and then Guzlowski’s Suitcase Charlie (reviewed here).

All really great books that I highly recommend.

Most recently, I finished the novella Slow Bear by Anthony Neil Smith.

This is a really great book for a lot of reasons. First, it’s novella, and I think the novella is an under appreciated form. The novella is almost the perfect length for a work of fiction. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a novel and felt as though it dragged in places… as though it was more concerned with word count than with reader enjoyment. I mean, if you consider that A River Runs Through It is a novella… well, clearly, the novella has some good company in its ranks.

So, yeah, buying this novella is the perfect way to experience a novella and how they function.

A better reason yet to buy it? It’s a really fun and wild read. In writing circles, you often hear the advice that plot should come out of character. This couldn’t be more true of Slow Bear. Our main character Micah “Slow Bear” Cross is a Native American ex-cop trying to live out his days on the reservation after losing his arm to a shotgun blast. He drinks at the casino and spends his nights on his trailer roof looking at the stars.

But, Slow Bear is a bit of a train wreck (the man, not the book). He’s the epitome of anti-hero, and his disjointed, illogical, impulsive approach to life is reflected in a disjointed, illogical, impulsive plot (the only kind of plot someone like Slow Bear could produce). Just when the reader (like Slow Bear) thinks the story is on a specific trajectory, the trajectory shifts, reroutes, changes… but in a way that makes sense because it’s happening to such a messed up person. 

Not more than a few times, I thought, “I know where this is going!” only to see the plot veer in another direction. Slow Bear doesn’t know the answer to what life is all about, and he certainly doesn’t know the answer to the question regarding what his own life is all about.

He just seems to get into one mess after another, often of his own making (but not always).

Train wreck or no, he is lovable. He’s sympathetic. He is fiercely loyal to those he loves when he can figure out who he loves.

I’ll say this much… as I was reading the first 50 pages, there’s no way I would have predicted the events in the last 25 pages… and that was a true pleasure.

Too often, because we’ve come to believe that fiction should end in redemption, much of fiction becomes predictable. The hero will get the guy or gal. The hero will find the wherewithal to defeat the villain. Etc, etc.

Slow Bear might start moving toward redemption at the end, but he has a long road ahead of him. I get the sense that Smith might not be done with Slow Bear.

One of the things that struck me about the plot was how it often changed because Slow Bear had been lied to in some way. He lives in a world of those with more authority and power lying to him. They make deals with him, he carries out his end of the deal (in his enjoyably haphazard way) only to find out that the deal was never grounded in truth. He honored his end of the bargain only to find out the others never had intended to honor their end… and they knew they wouldn’t honor it from the beginning. It’s probably the English professor in me, but I can’t help but think that Smith intended this as a metaphor for how Native Americans were treated throughout their history with encroaching white culture.

But, I could be wrong.

I often am.

Buy Slow Bear: here

          Jeff Vande Zande is an English professor at Delta College in Michigan. His latest collection, The                Neighborhood Division: Stories, is now out through Whistling Shade Press and available: here.