[In the following review, Duchemin praises King's linguistic skill as evidenced in the stories in One Good Story, That One.]

There are coyotes everywhere in [One Good Story, That One,] this new collection of stories by Thomas King, and not only in the text: pictures adorn the cover, the title page and the story headings. A live one seems to be talking enthusiastically to the author in his photograph on the dustjacket. Coyote is the trickster figure in the story-telling traditions of the Plains Indians, and her/his presence here warns us to watch out for our toes and other parts. At the end of the title story, where three anthropologists looking for traditional native stories are hoaxed with a satirical rendition of Adam and Eve (Ahdamn and Evening), the narrator has to “clean up all the coyote tracks on the floor”. Tricks are played on the audience in traditional Coyote stories, as well as on the characters, and often there is a very sharp point to them, or a lesson to be learned, which the story-teller expects you to figure out for yourself. Readers of Thomas King's fiction have come to savour these surprises and challenges, often concealed in tricky word-play or in satirical postmodern high jinks with a distinctly native twist.

King has emerged within the last three years as one of the most successful contemporary native writers in Canada and the United States. His first novel about a small Alberta town in Blackfoot territory, Medicine River, won a Commonwealth Writer's prize and was made into a television movie that recently aired on the CBC. King wrote the script for this film and he makes a brief but funny appearance in it himself as a basketball star, staring down morosely at the unfortunate Graham Greene from his vast height. (King the trickster is, by his own admission, a terrible basketball player.) A children's story, written for the 500th anniversary of the European “discovery” of America, A Coyote Columbus Story, was nominated for a Governor General's Award in 1992. His most complex and ambitious work, the novel Green Grass, Running Water, was nominated for a Governor General's Award in 1993.

One Good Story, That One is a finely designed paperback that brings together 10 short stories and “voice pieces”, all of which have appeared in periodicals between 1985 and 1992. There is great variety in these stories, but surprisingly little unevenness considering the period over which they were written. The single exception is “The One about Coyote Going West”, which seems to me to lack focus and clarity. All, however, are poised, elegant, deceptively simple and written with that apparently effortless control of language and imagery which is the hallmark of King's best work.

A number of these stories strike the reader with the startling, crazy vividness of a dream. For example, in “How Corporal Colin Sterling Saved Blossom, Alberta, and Most of the Rest of the World as Well”, all the Indians of the Americas become petrified and are carried off by blue alien coyotes in a spaceship. Some pieces fit easily into our conventional notions of the short story: “Traplines”, “Joe the Painter”, “Borders”. Others are not so easily categorized. The coyote tales and dialect pieces, reminiscent of Harry Robinson's Write It on Your Heart, give the impression of a traditional native story-teller speaking directly to us. In these stories, which include “One Good Story, That One”, “Magpies”, “The One about Coyote Going West”, and “A Columbus Coyote Story”, King tries to bridge the gap between oral story telling, which cannot be accurately represented in print, and the written word. The trick here is to give a plausible illusion of the speaker, and King excels at this verbal sleight of hand. The stories twist and turn unexpectedly in directions that are a challenge to readers accustomed to Western literary conventions. King has acknowledged Gabriel Garcia Marquez as an important influence on his work, as well as native American writers Scott Momaday and Louise Erdrich. The tone and quality of his writing, however, is unique.

In his fiction, King undermines and sabotages the dominant stereotypes of Indian-ness that have prevailed in Euro-American and Canadian culture. This system of representation has been fundamental to the ideology of the settler state since the time of Columbus, and it continues to be cleverly exploited by the mass media, and by such writers as W. P. Kinsella, who appropriate the native voice as a marketing device. King goes after Kinsella directly in “A Seat in the Garden”, one of the deftest stories in the collection, a devastating send-up of Shoeless Joe in which an imaginary Hollywood Indian suddenly appears in a cornfield to a racist white farmer, repeating the familiar message: “If you build it, they will come.” A couple of real Indians do indeed come, recycling garbage, but the white men in the story are too obsessed with the imaginary Indian in the cornfield to take much notice of them. Significantly, the real Indians can't even see this stereotype, which exists only in the white men's minds.

One of King's main targets is the tendency in Western culture to fix native people's reality in the past, or in some imaginary space outside of history, a process that Johannes Fabian has called the “denial of coevalness”. King's Indian characters inhabit history as intensely as everybody else, like the symbolically constipated middle-class narrator of “Traplines”, who is trying desperately to cope with his teenaged couch-potato son while he simultaneously reflects on the changes in his own lifetime and in his father's world.

King excels as a writer of the border zones between races, cultures and individuals. From a native perspective, the 49th parallel is an imaginary line drawn across Turtle Island by European invaders. King is fascinated with this line and its impact on the aboriginal inhabitants of the continent. One of his most memorable stories, “Borders”, confronts the issue directly. A Blackfoot woman and her young son find themselves trapped for several days in a parking lot between U.S. and Canadian Customs posts, because the mother insists that her citizenship is Blackfoot. “Canadian side or American side?” ask the exasperated officials. “Blackfoot side”, she replies defiantly. King does not diminish the cultural differences between the dominant cultures of the U.S. and Canada; in fact, the story recognizes their reality in a number of ways. The mother is distinctly unhappy with her daughter's decision to live in the U.S. and the family seems more at home with Canadian institutions. But both of these countries are alien to Blackfoot culture and King dissolves their differences symbolically at the end of the story in the landscape of Turtle Island, as the flagpoles of the two border stations disappear behind the hills.

King has lived very much among the paradoxes and contradictions of cultural borders. He was born to a white mother and a Cherokee father in California in 1943, where he was raised, and educated off-reservation. In Lethbridge, where he lived for 10 years, he taught Native Studies at the University and became deeply immersed in the local native culture. He is married to Helen Hoy, an outstanding Canadian, and holds Canadian citizenship, but resides at present in Minneapolis where he chairs the Indian Studies program at the University of Minnesota. He is spending the current year, however, in Toronto, as the story editor for a CBC television series about native people and he plans eventually to return permanently to Canada. Crossing and re-crossing borders seems to be the normal condition of his life so far.

King's fiction is not surprisingly, therefore, preoccupied with problems of communication. People seem to talk at cross-purposes in his stories, and their dialogue is full of Pinteresque discontinuities and comic misunderstandings at the level of language. Yet King does hold out the possibility of genuine human communication at a deeper level, and his characters frequently do connect in the eloquent gaps and silences between their words.

Reviewers have frequently remarked on the lack of bitterness in all of King's writing. He is a surprisingly good-natured social satirist, and it is tempting to view him in the tradition of Stephen Leacock or U.S. humourist James Thurber. This would be misleading, however. Humour has always been an important aspect of native culture both as a source of resistance to oppression and as a means of healing. King's prime targets are abusers of power: intransigent bureaucrats, pompous authorities, insensitive police officers, bigots, rednecks and racists. A strong sense of native community is balanced against these forces. His attitude is playfully subversive and lighthearted, rather than fiercely indignant. It is a deeply healing vision, which has been enthusiastically welcomed by native readers, and King makes it easy for all of us to share his point of view. He seldom focuses on the darker side of colonialism or its impact on native life today, however. Unfortunately, this position may make it rather too easy for the non-native reader to escape any sense of complicity in the structures of colonialism. Apart from the sheer brilliance of his writing, this may be one of the reasons that he has so readily been embraced by readers and critics from the dominant society. I hope that King's resounding success will not obscure the more uncomfortable vision offered by a number of other important native writers who are speaking out across Turtle Island.