Book Review

When I first read Bojan Louis’s short story collection Sinking Bell, I was an MFA student  halfway into a semester-long translation and adaptation course that for me, a short story writer, served as a primer to poetry. It was there that I learned about the opposing but complementary elements of the poetics—sound and form, narrative and imagery, and one pair in particular that shines through in Louis’s prose: clear language and mystery. In this eight-story collection, Louis deftly uses his poetic skill to craft captivating stories full of rough characters, haunting images, and surprising kindnesses that evoke a specific and powerful tension, a “clear mystery” that starts with the title—what is a sinking bell, anyway?

Louis, a Diné writer and professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona, got his start with his 2017 poetry collection Currents, which won an American Book Award. Louis’s poetry and prose arrive to the literary scene on an overdue wave of Indigenous representation and storytelling. Perhaps lesser known than debut Indigenous writers published by larger publishing houses—like Morgan Talty, Tommy Orange, or most recently National Book Award winner Ned Blackhawk—Louis is a striking contributor to the growing contemporary representation of Indigenous peoples and the often grueling realities of the poverty, addiction, and racism that some communities face. This movement of stories, complex in and of themselves, add to a growing tapestry of Indigenous storytelling that challenges readers to understand the Native experience in new ways. By invoking narrative traditions rooted in Indigenous mythology and culture, these authors, Louis included, are boldly changing the literary landscape in a movement guiding literature away from hackneyed patriarchal standards.

Louis invokes, with a poetic sharpness, the edges of Indigenous mythology, providing windows into the lives of many unrelated characters who are connected both by ancestry and by perseverance. The stories, set in and around Phoenix, feature protagonists that scurry through the mental mazes of healing, relapse, homelessness, racism, breakups, and other ruinations. In the opening story, “Trickster Myths,” the narrator, a writer, spends time in the strip club where Bella, a fellow writer and love interest, works. Together, they grapple with the question of whether writing is retraumatizing or healing them. Bella, who is white, asks blunt questions about Indigenous storytelling, which the narrator, who is Diné, largely ignores, until they are confronted by an unmistakable Native symbol: the coyote. From there, the collection traverses different narrative forms—in “Make No Sound to Wake,” the reader hovers with the spectral narrator as she eavesdrops on her ancestor, a mother, telling her children the story of the narrator’s fate. In just twenty pages, Louis crafts a story within a story, traversing time and place, as both the narrator and the watched mother tell of the narrator’s experiences in the Trail of Tears, displacement, and mental illness. The structure itself provides a formal quality that feels like an echo, in which the characters are asking themselves and each other, Who are we?

In “Volcano,” we meet day laborer and uncle Phillip George, who once dreamed of becoming a pro soccer player but now finds himself caring for his nephew (who has Down syndrome and an obsession with bats), who was recently abandoned by his relapsing sister. Straddling his duties as provider and caregiver, Phillip George struggles to manage childcare with his hourly wages, a temporary living situation, and unreliable bus schedules. His goal throughout the story? To take his nephew to see the bat cave. Other stories expose the difficulties of work and poverty with many of the down-and-out characters just trying to get by. In “As Meaningless as the Origin,” Lucas and the narrator endure a construction job for a wealthy white man who treats them poorly. Then they meet a known neo-Nazi at the bar. Tension emanates from every scene, but the narrator returns, over and over again, to something more compelling than the action in the foreground: his daydream of another life in Alaska. The remaining stories in the collection center around memorable characters who tread on slippery slopes as well: economic hardship, mental instability, sobriety, and love. Each story is threaded with an underlying tension that produces a feeling that at any point, something could go terribly wrong; but Louis’s characters are tenacious and earn a constant confidence that some good change can come about, even if the endings often prove otherwise.

Louis’s writing is transfixing and haunting at times. He has the measured prose of a poet, each phrase packed with imagery and meaning—a girlfriend is burning eggs that smell like the “carbon stench of embryonic poultry,” and an underage driver who is conscripted as rez chauffeur says that “the black asphalt had become my veins.” Louis’s imagistic exactitude renders heartbreak and hope with distinct originality. Toward the middle of the collection, we get some clarity on the title when a character says, “My head rang sharply and then, like an enormous bell cast into the ocean and sinking, I heard nothing at all.” On the surface, a sinking bell is just that—a sinking bell. But Louis asks us to interrogate it and consider this strange image—a wildly vibrating, sounding instrument being tossed into a vast body of water. Is it silenced and forgotten? Can it be retrieved? His characters think in “would-haves,” often escaping through future-tense thought in the radical act of dreaming that often ends in heartache. Maybe that is the sound of a sinking bell? Louis gives us much to explore.