[McManus is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, and educator. In the following mixed review of Green Grass, Running Water, he examines the novel's structure.]

"As long as the grass is green and the waters run" is a phrase indicating perpetuity in 18th- and 19th-century treaties that ceded Indian land to the Governments of the United States and Canada. The Cherokee writer Thomas King uses the phrase in his second novel, Green Grass, Running Water, to underscore contemporary skepticism and rage about documents signed under duress several generations ago.

Even the hapless Blackfoot, Lionel Red Dog, a television and stereo salesman who is the novel's central character, can recognize the malignant, if unintended, irony:

It was a nice phrase, all right. But it didn't mean anything…. Every Indian on the reserve knew that. Treaties were hardly sacred documents. They were contracts, and no one signed a contract for eternity. No one. Even the E-Z Pay contracts Bursum [Lionel's condescending white boss] offered to his customers to help make a complete home entertainment system affordable never ran much past 5 or 10 years. Even with the balloon payment.

Such treaties continue to be enforced, of course, even though the prairie around the Blackfoot reserve in Alberta is no longer green enough to support any game, and the province has literally stopped the waters from running by damming a sacred tribal river.

The narrative whorling around Lionel's midlife crisis and the not unrelated completion of the dam consists of eight major strands; from the opening pages we begin to feel uneasy about whether Mr. King will be able to braid them together effectively. In the most allegorical dimension, four ancient Indian shamans both comment on and help to determine the earthbound action in a manner that crossbreeds Greek, Indian and biblical creation myths.

There are also politically correct sendups of Columbus and Hollywood westerns, a pastiche of 19th-century social and literary values featuring Moby-Jane, Changing Woman and a running ontological debate between the Trickster Coyote and God over such issues as water, the First Woman and her male companion "Ahdamn." The tone of these episodes is broadly farcical, often to the point of cartoonishness: "So along comes this earthquake. Rumble, rumble, rumble, rumble, says that Earthquake. This is fun."

Lionel's story is more naturalistically told. About to turn 40, out of shape and unmarried, he is unable to decide whether to stay on at Bursum's store or go back to college. He is also torn by a fear that he may have "gone white," a feeling that stems from, among other sources, his childhood desire to be John Wayne. Not John Wayne the actor, but (far worse) the hero portrayed by the actor: "the John Wayne who saved stagecoaches and wagon trains from Indian attacks."

By way of contrast, Lionel's uncle, Eli Stands Alone, is single-handedly blocking the completion of the dam by refusing to vacate his mother's ancestral cabin. The dam has already produced thousands of acres of lakefront real estate, most of which has been sold to such affluent outsiders as Bursum and Charlie Looking Bear, the handsome and cynical lawyer who represents the dam construction conglomerate and who is competing with Lionel for the affections of Alberta Frank. Alberta, a college professor from Calgary, is desperate to become pregnant but she remains unpersuaded that either Charlie or Lionel—any man, for that matter—would make a very satisfactory husband.

Unlikely convergences and apocalyptic reversals soon begin to proliferate—orchestrated, we are told, by Coyote and the shamans. By the time the various subplots culminate at the annual Sun Dance celebration, the cast of human and mythological characters Mr. King has brought into play has become large, confusing and exceedingly talkative.

Such prolixity causes the novel to lose its momentum as Mr. King interrupts himself with continual explanatory flashbacks and point-of-view changes. Characters incessantly "talk past" one another, sometimes to genuinely comic effect. Too often, however, the result is a mishmash, as in this exchange between Lionel and his father:

"I'm thinking about going back to university."

"Good idea…. Maybe you want to give me a hand this weekend."

"You know if the band has any money for school?"

"Going to go to the mountains and cut some new poles."

"Bill Bursum offered me a job at his store."

"The old ones are pretty shot."

"Televisions and stereos. Pretty easy to sell."

"Sun Dance is coming up. Got to get the poles fixed up before then."

"Charlie used to work for him. Made 40, 50 thousand last year."

"Take part of a day. That's all."

That they continue in this vein for another 16 lines only makes the passage more representative of dozens of others, many of which involve three or four speakers. While parallel soliloquies often may constitute everyday conversations, especially between estranged sons and fathers, Mr. King's overuse of this device serves neither his comic aspirations nor his efforts at verisimilitude.

Mr. King's working premise is that the linear version of a story leaves out its most interesting aspects—that truth lies somewhere in the digressionary minutiae. When Lionel asks his uncle why he returned to the reservation after teaching for years in Toronto, Eli informs him: "Can't just tell you that straight out. Wouldn't make any sense. Wouldn't be much of a story."

Eli's point is certainly valid, especially since his own career as an author and professor, his troubled marriage to a white woman named Karen and his friendship with the dam's construction supervisor are all compelling in their personal and sociological complexity.

Mr. King, however, carries this premise several stages too far, both by making it repetitively explicit and by spending similar numbers of words on characters much less intriguing than Lionel or his uncle. His novel thus verges on becoming a reductive parody instead of a telling example of its own central narrative principle.

The book is nonetheless impressively ambitious and funny. Houndburger recipes and fabulist metaphysics, gender and environmental politics, Christian and Native American folklore, farcical humor and high moral seriousness, devastated ancient cultures confined on "reserves" in the middle of huge modern nations—to braid these together convincingly is a formidable task for a novelist to set for himself. In Green Grass, Running Water Mr. King hasn't quite brought it off.