The Absence of Angels

Albert (Alley) Hummingbird, the shy hero of this imaginative and entertaining first novel, is a mixed-blood Indian who must contend with a father who abandoned Nez Perce ways to marry a rather daft white woman, with an uncle haunted by the ghosts of pilots he sent to their deaths during WW II and with Death itself, which is treated as a character. To save newborn Alley from the grim reaper, his grandfather, the source of his Native American values, ``took a disappointed Death by the wrist, put Him in the passenger seat of the 1947 Plymouth'' and drove to a far-off mission, ``where he left Him chained like a rabid dog.'' The boy will encounter Death again in pet burials and his sister's secret retreats to the graveyard. The opposite sex also causes much heartache for Alley, who feels the need to make everything right for every woman he knows. Skipping lyrically between his hero's childhood and young adulthood, Penn has produced a delightful work of magic realism reminiscent of John Nichols's The Milagro Beanfield War . Flashbacks abound, and the reader is never quite sure whether Alley's wise grandfather is alive or merely living in his imagination. Himself of Native American and white ancestry, the author limns with insight the struggles of modern, urban, often mixed-blood Indians to forge a coherent identity. (Feb.)