[Butler is an American novelist, short story writer, and poet. In the review below, he provides a favorable assessment of Medicine River.]

We may presume that Thomas King, who is Cherokee, Greek and German and teaches American studies at the University of Minnesota, knows his territory. His first novel, Medicine River, is a nice book, in the older sense of the word "nice": economical, precise, and elegant.

Medicine River would appear to be a charming and low-key tale, dependent for its effects on the reader's gradually building affection for a set of engaging if generally diffident main characters.

Will, the narrator, is half Blackfoot and a photographer in Medicine River, a small town on the edge of a Blackfoot reserve in Alberta, Canada. He is one of two sons of a spirited Blackfoot woman and a charming but ne'er-do-well rodeo rider, both now dead. He cannot live on the reserve itself, since he is not full Blackfoot. His brother is kept offstage traveling the world, except for flashbacks. His father was never home during Will's youth, and his mother refused to talk about the man.

The absence of his father, it becomes clear, is the great condition of Will's life, and it has made him profoundly detached and passive. What is his last name? His mother was named, beautifully, Rose Horse Capture. Naming is important in the interconnected stories, and yet the narrator withholds his own patronymic, allowing us only to consider the floating ironies in the way his friends address him: "Will."

Into this vacuum of desire comes Harlen Bigbear, a sort of concerned and mothering trickster, not just for Will, but for all the Native North American characters. Will affects an amused tolerance for Harlen's continual whirl of matchmakings, promotional ideas, reconciliations, schemes and excursions, but Harlen is the primary agent of change in the book and Will is, in fact, completely dependent on him. (It will develop that Harlen was directly responsible for Will's move from the cold and alien Edmonton, where his mother had taken her young family, back to Medicine River.)

When we first meet Harlen, he has come across a packet of letters Will's father wrote to his mother, the same packet, we learn in flashbacks, that she once became furious with her son for discovering and reading.

About the second thing that Harlen does is persuade Will to become a center for an all-Indian basketball team that Harlen has, according to Harlen, been finagled into coaching. He manages this in typically oblique fashion, showing up at Will's studio with a blue basketball jersey pulled over his plaid jacket and carrying a brown paper grocery bag.

"So, what's in the bag?" Will says.

"Your uniform, Will," Harlen responds.

About the third thing Harlen does is get Will involved with Louise Heavyman, the accountant who does their taxes. Louise is pregnant, but refuses to marry the father, claiming she wants a child without the bother of a husband. Harlen is touting Louise as a match, and although Will at first resists, he does go with her to the hospital, where he is mistaken by the staff for the father and where he more or less accidentally, looking at a sign, gives the child the name she will go by for the rest of her life: South Wing.

Most of the rest is subplot, myriad smaller and quicker stories worked out within these three larger rhythms. Will recalls an episode in which his mother and a friend are suspected of shoplifting. The basketball team is good, but not motivated—the players like to get drunk after a victory and then lose the next game—until a star player, Clyde Whiteman, ends up in jail and they win anyway. Will is seduced by a white woman, Susan Adamson, then cast away when she no longer needs him. A friend, January Pretty Weasel, may or may not be guilty of shooting her husband, another friend. Harlen's heretofore unmentioned brother comes to town and leads Will and Harlen into a dangerous dare. Louise buys a house and Will almost moves in.

Somewhere in mid-book the reader begins to understand the author's method. He counters stereotypes deftly without comment: against the widespread perception that Indians do not wish to have their photographs made, he places Will, the photographer. Harlen comes onstage exclaiming "Hey-uh" after every sentence, because he has heard Will Sampson doing it on television. The reader laughs with Will at the looping, interminable family stories offered by Indian characters, only to realize that the novel makes its points in just that same indirect manner.

But the finest of all Mr. King's many subtleties involves Will—for in his uncertain parentage and lack of drive, he is formed as an image for the state of all the Blackfeet. Native North American but disconnected from their heritage, citizens but not at home in the ambitions of the world, they drift with their fates. This most satisfying novel ends as it should, not in a clash of cymbals, but with the brushes laid quietly against the drums for a beat or so after the music ends.