[In the following review, Low describes King's intermingling of Native American and European beliefs and his use of humor in Green Grass, Running Water.]

Humor is the thread that runs through both of Thomas King's novels, Medicine River (1989) and the new Green Grass, Running Water. The tone in each is understated farce. In Medicine River, the hero Will says of his friend, “Harlen Bigbear was my friend, and being Harlen's friend was hard. I can tell you that” (p. 11). The rest of the novel tells exactly how this lovable busybody is a friend to all in a Canadian prairie town. The novel follows conventions of realism, and the close-knit community comes to life through a series of absurdist episodes. The humor in Green Grass, Running Water, though, is raised to another level of cosmic farce. The story line is intermixed with a meta-creation account modeled after Pueblo, Iroquois, Christian, and Siouan traditions—and more.

Fortunately, the novel limits itself to one geographic region, again the Canadian prairies of Alberta. This helps continuity. The plot is a familiar one in Native American fiction: Native daughter and sons go out into the non-Indian world, gain experience, and return to their reservation homes to find identity and some measure of peace. House Made of Dawn, Winter in the Blood, Ceremony, Yellow Raft in Blue Water, and Love Medicine all play off this motif.

The genius of the novel is the behind-the-scenes look at three characters—Alberta, Lionel, and Charlie—as they journey back to the Blackfoot reserve. Through them, King proposes that creation is ongoing, and even these ordinary individuals are entwined in a web of magical forces. Alberta, a professor, conceives a baby with either Lionel or Charlie and returns to the reserve to help rebuild a family cabin. The baby is the central impetus for new creation in the novel, and the prospective fathers confirm traditional ties to family.

Gods who carry out divine creation in this whimsical landscape are an unlikely assortment of mythic and twentieth-century characters. And King has a point. Whoever is responsible for the world of this era has a lot of new variables. If there is a God, or godly committee, s/he/they must be cognizant of many beliefs. So superimposed on the love story of Alberta, Lionel, and Charlie (and their families and friends) is a conversation of a crowd of gods. There are Dream, Coyote, First Woman, grandmother Turtle, Ahdamn, Thought Woman, and Young Man Walking on Water. Ahdamn, who lives in a place like the Garden of Eden, has the project of naming objects, but mixes up “microwave oven” with “elk” (p. 33). And there is a troupe of angelic elders who, with Coyote, make themselves visible to humans: the Lone Ranger, Robinson Crusoe, Ishmael, and Hawkeye.

This creation is not a simple one, but King manages to cobble together a plausible synthesis of Native American and European beliefs. The vantage point, though, is clearly Native American, as these gods tease each other throughout the story. Humor permeates their dialogues, from First Woman to Coyote. And the first-person narrator appears only at this meta-level, interacting playfully with gods, who may be playing the role of the writer's muses as well.

The secondary plot lines branch out like those of a Russian novel, as chaotically as in real life. Each subplot moves logically to resolution, and eventually they all intersect in the grand finale.

Chaos itself is a theme, as the writer and the gods work to harness so many ideas. Another important theme is that of identity. One of the most effective scenes of the book is when Alberta teaches a classroom of university students about Native American history. King gives the students names like Henry Dawes, John Collier, Richard Pratt, and Mary Rowlandson. And when the Blackfoot character Lionel is a child, he wants to be John Wayne, although his father suggests, “We got a lot of famous men and women, too” (p. 203). Coyote and company step in during a showing of a John Wayne movie on television—watched simultaneously by most of the characters in different places—and they change the outcome to favor the Indians, not the cowboys.

King delivers an optimistic message: that opposites can reconcile, that bad movies can be amended, and that creation is not stuck in the atrocities of the past. The means for all this is humor at every level of human and divine experience—and intermixings of those two.