THIS is alyric novel, dominated by the storyteller`s voice and by her technique, butwide-ranging and skilfully written. And it`s a valuable document, apsychological and historical map of the north-western Prairies from frontier tosuburbs. Plainsong follows the meandering trail ofa man`s life. The narrator, Paula, has inherited her grandfather Paddon`s fragmentary and barely legible journal,and feels compelled to fill in the blanks. Beginning with the old man`s deathand concluding with his conception, Huston brilliantly inverts the genealogicalnarrative, drawing on the lives of four generations and covering more than acentury. The novel is full of echoes, variations, stories repeated with freshand multiple perspectives: I don`t yet know exactly how they met butI know that the world in which they met was a world of madness, Paddon, a crazymaking world in which peoplewere scattered through empty space and endless flatness, a house here and thennothing as far as the eye could see, a house there and then nothing nothingnothing. It`s full of rushed run-on sentences,like a song sung on the breath. I find the direct address, the second-personaddress, "Paddon-you," too imperative. And this style dilutes thefictional life; it`s full of elision and summary, dominated by the presence ofthe storyteller, researcher, cartographer, who won`t quite give the story itsfull creative independence. Again, more like a song, dominated by the singer svoice. Paddon`s long-time loveaffair with a Native woman named Miranda, a sub-plot tacked on to the novel inthe same way that Native culture is grafted onto white, permits Pddon somerelief from the consistent denial of all tenderness, intellect, and beauty (itseems that a dried-up Prairie culture would deny such an oasis). Miranda is abit of a goddess figure, but she`s corporeal, and she does have some goodlines, tough and funny and unyielding. Here is Miranda bringing Pddon up shortwhen he gets sentimental about "Indian time": You laughed. You saidyou should have been born a Blackfoot. She sat up in bed and pushed you out ofher, you gasped with the shock of your disunion, your cock suddenly cold andunconnected to her but she was angry, yanking the blankets around her shoulders- I never heard you say anything so stupid, Paddon, you can be really stupid ... I`m sick and tired of whitesfeeling so guilty they destroyed us they have to say we were perfect. It`s justlike your Christ thing. You know, when the missionaries first went into Sarceeterritory and stuck a cross in the ground where they wanted to build a church,the Sarcee were scared as rabbits. They saw this guy nailed to the cross andthey said Oh oh, is that the way these guys treat their enemies? Then when thepriests told them Oh no, this is our very best friend, this is the man we lovethe most in the whole wide world, this is the most perfect man that ever lived,the Sarcees decided they must becrazy. Temperance, evangelical religion,ruthless missionary zeal, a brutal shotgun union forcing a blandly modernculture out of frontier. Forcing a Dominion out of bleak Prairie, an inane andcontemporary urban peace that in this novel is commensurate with Paddon`s old age. Huston does have a wonderful grasp ofPrairie life, and its history. She writes with tenderness, with compassion, ofPaddon`s aggressive, selfish nature. She avoids the sociological diction ofdomestic violence and she avoids dogmatic feminism. The family tree is warpedand misshapen. In this respect the book resonates, and the story has far moreof the precariousness and ambivalence of a breathing tale. Huston`s tough,resolute intelligence and range of focus make Plainsong abeautiful book.