[In the following review, Berner states that while Vizenor makes astute points in Manifest Manners, the writing is muddled and infused with jargon.]

Those readers who may wonder what the terms in Vizenor's title mean will have to read the book. "Manifest manners" plays on "manifest destiny" to suggest a variety of cultural realities which falsify the experience of American Indians and exploit their culture for commercial, political, and other inappropriate purposes. "Postindian warriors" are the present generation of Indian writers who counter these "manifest manners" with representations of authentic Indian experience. (Survivance means "survival.")

In a discussion of traditional tribal storytelling, Vizenor contrasts it with "the classical notion that thoughts were representations of content, or the coherent meaning of words." Maybe he's right about these storytellers, but no matter how bemused he might be by odd notions justified as "postmodern," the cultural or social critic who wants to tell readers exactly what he means ought to remember that the "classical notion" here dismissed so casually remains a sensible assumption. It is also worth nothing that the above claim is embedded in almost two pages of quotations strung together with little comment to leave the addled reader suspecting that in spite of modish allegiance to supposedly advanced ideas, the academy today is grinding out as much muddled writing as it ever did. Indeed, Vizenor's citation of one Richard Wolin's explanation of Foucault's comment on Derrida's "[leading] us into the text from which … we never emerge" suggests that he expects his readers to wander around in his linguistic maze and never return to a world where most people—some of them even professing English in universities—try to say clearly what they mean.

If this judgment seems harsh to reviewers who have admired Vizenor's fictional writings—I am one of them, by the way—they can tell me what is meant by the following: "The postindian turns in literature, the later indication of new narratives, are an invitation to the closure of dominance in the ruins of representation. The invitation uncovers traces of tribal survivance, trickster hermeneutics, and the remanence of intransitive shadows."

What is most unfortunate about the publication of Manifest Manners is that Vizenor's complaints point in the right direction. Reservation casinos probably will lead to disappointment, the Indian "activists" he condemns do deserve it, mainstream American culture does falsify Indian experience, and so on. Still, those who need to be told this—and even those who don't—will finish the book, if they do finish it, feeling they have fallen into a mudbath of jargon, much of it invented by the author, the rest of it already proving a great bore in our graduate schools. Come to think of it, however, Vizenor's contention that the true Indian vision is comic might make us wonder. Could he have intended his book as a joke, a spoof of the worst excesses of academic self-indulgence? If so, the joke is less on defenders of clear prose than on those of us who really do believe that it matters whether Indian tribes maintain their social and cultural integrity.