[In the following review of Dead Voices, Crum commends Vizenor's efforts to retell traditional Native American myths but finds the work unconvincing.]

Those wild animals that hold center stage in the traditional stories and dreams of American Indians, those beings that are mythically empowered with magical talents—whatdo they think about this crazy century of ours? In his latest novel, Gerald Vizenor gives them voice, and it turns out that they easily fit the post-modernist mode.

The governing condition of the animals in Dead Voices: Natural Agonies in the New World is dislocation. These creatures—bears, fleas, praying mantises, crows, beavers and others—have lost some of their power. Or they have power and don't always know what to do with it. They are urban animals now, and they display a discomforting urban energy. They're still capable of transformation and trickery, but these days they perform feats in order to heal new sorts of spiritual wounds, those caused by the separation of modern civilization from the natural world.

But the biggest obstacle these animals face in getting their message across is the author's own penchant for verbal tricksterism. Mr. Vizenor, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley, who is himself part Indian, seems intent on using his novel to out-Coyote Coyote, the trickster of Indian lore. It would seem a dubious enterprise.

Mr. Vizenor's book (the second volume in the University of Oklahoma Press's American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series, for which he serves as general editor) takes its structure from an Indian card game called wanaki, which is a little like tarot—except that the player is temporarily transformed into the animal pictured on the turned-up card. The player in this case is an old Indian woman named Bagese, a shaman whom the narrator meets on the streets of Oakland, Calif. Fascinated by the way Bagese seems to converse with the birds in a local park, he follows her back to her apartment. There, in encounters that stretch over the next two years, she teaches him "how to hear and see the animals in stories."

Each chapter begins with a turn of a card and a different animal. And each story progresses by means of ritual, symbol and philosophical debate, by repetition and transformation, by jokes and puns, even by traditional narrative forms. Characters hide in mirrors and shadows. They easily exchange identities. Surprisingly enough, they face only a few antagonists, notably the "wordies"—people too slow and literal-minded to follow along. (Anthropologists appear to be archetypal wordies.)

But uninitiated readers may find that the going can get pretty slippery. After struggling through the following paragraph (and this is one example out of many), I resigned myself to the fact that I too may well be a wordy:

"The praying mantis wear chance on their sleeves, a chance to hear the comic side of their survival. Mantis pray that sex is a chance, and comic survival is on their side. The mantis are slow but not stupid, and everyone knows sex can be a trickster at the right moment, even the word ies. Sex can turn the best minds to comedies, but how do the mantis survive sex with a chance?"

As presented in many Indian tales, tricksters often work wonders by mistake. Hurling the stars into the sky in a fit of rage, for instance, Coyote accidentally created the constellations. Such luck does not always hold for Mr. Vizenor, who appears to be wearing the trickster spirit on his sleeve.

The attempt to resurrect traditional myths and set them loose in the modern world is a creditable one. The magical powers of animals—their particular ways of knowing; their talents for surviving; their reluctance, in Walt Whitman's phrase, to "sweat and whine about their condition"—should be recognized as complements to human experience. We ignore these creatures (or exterminate them) at our own peril.

Unfortunately, the characters in this book are less animals than puppets. We cannot believe in them; we can only remark on the artfulness of Mr. Vizenor's presentation.