Watermelon Nights
by Greg Sarris
The open-hearted, quirkily textured Native American family saga of Greg Sarris' second book (after the story collection Grand Avenue ), is a rich, structurally adventurous reading experience. In Watermelon Nights, Sarris, who is chairman of the Federated Coast Miwok Tribe, has wrought characters whose emotional cores have a warmly approachable universality, but whose lives are compellingly idiosyncratic on the surface. The reader is simultaneously drawn in by their strangeness and comforted by their familiarity. Sarris divides his book into a triptych of first person narratives: The ragged contemporary vernacular of street-smart 20 year-old Johnny Severe is followed by the guilt-wracked reminiscences of his secretive, cranky grandmother Elba, a prostitute in her youth. The story is brought full-circle when the the clear, empathic voice of Johnny's mother Iris comes in to carry the book to a somewhat hasty finish. In the opening section, Johnny, a vintage clothing dealer, offers a smart-ass but vulnerable account of confused ethnic, cultural and sexual identities in a California community that is not so much a melting pot as a chunky red, white, black and brown American stew. The great, unfortunate flaw of Watermelon Nights is that the gorgeous, gritty lyricism of Johnny's storytelling, which concludes with the transcendent nocturnal banquet that gives the book its title, is never quite matched in the two subsequent narratives, even when they cleverly echo its motifs. Nonetheless, there are juicy rewards throughout these memorable slices of life.
