Old School Indian

In Curtis’s electrifying debut, a restless and gravely ill Miami bookseller takes stock of his life and his Mohawk heritage. Abe Jacobs, 43, returns to the St. Regis Mohawk Reservation on the border of New York State and Quebec in 2016, hoping his healer uncle Budge Billings can cure his rare and life-threatening illness. The narrative is intercut with a series of poems attributed to Abe’s brash and witty alter ego Dominick Deer Woods (“This One Goes Out to All the Colonizers,” etc.), whom Abe fashioned back in the 1990s as an undergraduate at Syracuse University. Now, as Abe undergoes his treatment, Budge regales him with Mohawk creation stories and Abe reflects bitterly on the erosion of their culture and language. He also reckons with his years of aimlessness and recklessness, which led to his obesity and estrangement from his wife, Alex. Moments of heartbreak shape the present-day narrative, such as Alex’s return to the rez to ask for a divorce, making Abe’s desire for renewal all the more touching as he grasps the meaning of Budge’s lessons on their ancestral language, which he’d never learned (“Gossip is a toadlike creature slinking herky-jerky through muck while eierihwenhawihtha is a sing-song wind rustling through tree limbs”). Even more impressive is Curtis’s ability to find harmony in the novel’s distinctive voices. This astonishes. Agent: Melissa Danaczko, SK Agency. (May)