Post by Okwes on Dec 19, 2006 12:24:40 GMT -5
It Takes a Village
To stave off bankruptcy, a small town declares itself an Indian tribe and welcomes casino gambling.
Reviewed by Tom Perrotta
Sunday, November 19, 2006; Page BW07
NOT ENOUGH INDIANS
A Novel
By Harry Shearer
Justin Charles. 225 pp. $19.95
Harry Shearer occupies a peculiar niche in our pop cultural landscape, somehow managing to be legendary (he played the cucumber-packing bassist in "This Is Spinal Tap"), ubiquitous (he supplies the voices of Ned Flanders and Mr. Burns, among others, on "The Simpsons") and more or less unknown to the general public. For a guy associated with so many high-profile undertakings (he was also a writer and cast member on "Saturday Night Live" in the early 1980s), Shearer probably doesn't get pestered too much for his autograph while shopping for groceries.
As any writer whose last name isn't Rowling or Grisham will attest, publishing a book doesn't usually pose a serious threat to one's status as a non-famous person, so it's safe to speculate that the arrival of Shearer's first novel -- an engaging political satire called Not Enough Indians-- probably won't turn him into a household name. But the book should serve as a welcome reminder of Shearer's extraordinary versatility as an artist and solidify his reputation as a keen-eyed comic observer of American life.
Not Enough Indians is a high-concept novel in the Christopher Buckley mode, with a premise that's at once utterly outrageous and weirdly plausible. The town of Gammage, N.Y., is in deep trouble: The factories have shut down, the roads and schools are in disrepair, and the beleaguered municipal government can barely afford to collect the garbage. Even the public radio station has closed, replaced by a "Christian radio network that features 'Hot Jesus Talk.' "
After failing to woo a Wal-Mart or sell "naming rights to a big ugly building on the wrong side of town," the city fathers find temporary economic salvation in the unlikely figure of Tony "Loose Slots" Silotta, a thuggish mogul from Las Vegas looking for a piece of the lucrative Indian casino action. Hoping to beat the dubious Wowosa tribe of Connecticut ("It's not wow! It's Wowosa!") at its own game, Silotta makes the town of Gammage an offer it can't refuse: "Let me get this straight," a pony-tailed selectperson says. "You want us to get the entire population of the town recognized as an Indian tribe so that we can open a gambling casino?"
The bureaucratic obstacles to this fraud turn out to be easier to navigate than one might expect, due to the fact that Vince Winstanley, a deputy assistant secretary at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, just happens to be under pressure from his boss to speed up the certification of "the unrecognized tribes, 250 groups of Native Americans who enjoyed neither tribal sovereignty nor the unalloyed pleasures of reservation life because the federal government had never signed treaties with them." Add a smooth-talking Washington lawyer to the mix and before long, the citizens of Gammage have been reborn as the Filaquonsett tribe, upon whose newly sovereign land Silotta constructs a "vast, galactic" casino, big enough that "two Wowosas and an Office Depot" can fit inside it.
Shearer is at his satiric best in chronicling the absurdities of Gammage's cultural and economic metamorphosis. Embracing their new identity with more fervor than seems absolutely necessary, many Filaquonsetts actually seem to believe they're Indians: "We prayed to Ngadala, the god of the sun and the moon, to rescue our tribe, and our valley, and our prayers have been answered," Dr. Gardner declares, while wearing a headdress and a three-piece suit. The townspeople learn the ceremonial Eagle Dance and greet each other with the words, "Hya, hya, hya." Needless to say, the Wowosas are not amused, and soon the two ersatz tribes are engaged in a very real battle for survival.
For a relatively short book, Not Enough Indians is packed with characters, a rogue's gallery of earnest city officials, long-winded local activists, unctuous consultants, wily bureaucrats, Native American hucksters, Vegas high-rollers and assorted eccentrics. This crowded field plays to one of Shearer's strengths as a writer: He's a master of the thumbnail sketch. But at times, entertaining and politically astute as it is, the novel seems to lack a center, a single character or relationship that the reader can track all the way from beginning to end.
Arriving on the heels of the Jack Abramoff scandal, Not Enough Indians may also suffer a bit in comparison to that epic tale of casino-related corruption. None of the characters in Shearer's novel seems as operatically venal as Abramoff or as nakedly hypocritical as Ralph Reed, the fallen choirboy of the Christian right. As Philip Roth pointed out way back in the '60s, American reality is always running a step or two ahead of the imagination of even our boldest novelists. ยท
Tom Perrotta is the author, most recently, of "Little Children."
To stave off bankruptcy, a small town declares itself an Indian tribe and welcomes casino gambling.
Reviewed by Tom Perrotta
Sunday, November 19, 2006; Page BW07
NOT ENOUGH INDIANS
A Novel
By Harry Shearer
Justin Charles. 225 pp. $19.95
Harry Shearer occupies a peculiar niche in our pop cultural landscape, somehow managing to be legendary (he played the cucumber-packing bassist in "This Is Spinal Tap"), ubiquitous (he supplies the voices of Ned Flanders and Mr. Burns, among others, on "The Simpsons") and more or less unknown to the general public. For a guy associated with so many high-profile undertakings (he was also a writer and cast member on "Saturday Night Live" in the early 1980s), Shearer probably doesn't get pestered too much for his autograph while shopping for groceries.
As any writer whose last name isn't Rowling or Grisham will attest, publishing a book doesn't usually pose a serious threat to one's status as a non-famous person, so it's safe to speculate that the arrival of Shearer's first novel -- an engaging political satire called Not Enough Indians-- probably won't turn him into a household name. But the book should serve as a welcome reminder of Shearer's extraordinary versatility as an artist and solidify his reputation as a keen-eyed comic observer of American life.
Not Enough Indians is a high-concept novel in the Christopher Buckley mode, with a premise that's at once utterly outrageous and weirdly plausible. The town of Gammage, N.Y., is in deep trouble: The factories have shut down, the roads and schools are in disrepair, and the beleaguered municipal government can barely afford to collect the garbage. Even the public radio station has closed, replaced by a "Christian radio network that features 'Hot Jesus Talk.' "
After failing to woo a Wal-Mart or sell "naming rights to a big ugly building on the wrong side of town," the city fathers find temporary economic salvation in the unlikely figure of Tony "Loose Slots" Silotta, a thuggish mogul from Las Vegas looking for a piece of the lucrative Indian casino action. Hoping to beat the dubious Wowosa tribe of Connecticut ("It's not wow! It's Wowosa!") at its own game, Silotta makes the town of Gammage an offer it can't refuse: "Let me get this straight," a pony-tailed selectperson says. "You want us to get the entire population of the town recognized as an Indian tribe so that we can open a gambling casino?"
The bureaucratic obstacles to this fraud turn out to be easier to navigate than one might expect, due to the fact that Vince Winstanley, a deputy assistant secretary at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, just happens to be under pressure from his boss to speed up the certification of "the unrecognized tribes, 250 groups of Native Americans who enjoyed neither tribal sovereignty nor the unalloyed pleasures of reservation life because the federal government had never signed treaties with them." Add a smooth-talking Washington lawyer to the mix and before long, the citizens of Gammage have been reborn as the Filaquonsett tribe, upon whose newly sovereign land Silotta constructs a "vast, galactic" casino, big enough that "two Wowosas and an Office Depot" can fit inside it.
Shearer is at his satiric best in chronicling the absurdities of Gammage's cultural and economic metamorphosis. Embracing their new identity with more fervor than seems absolutely necessary, many Filaquonsetts actually seem to believe they're Indians: "We prayed to Ngadala, the god of the sun and the moon, to rescue our tribe, and our valley, and our prayers have been answered," Dr. Gardner declares, while wearing a headdress and a three-piece suit. The townspeople learn the ceremonial Eagle Dance and greet each other with the words, "Hya, hya, hya." Needless to say, the Wowosas are not amused, and soon the two ersatz tribes are engaged in a very real battle for survival.
For a relatively short book, Not Enough Indians is packed with characters, a rogue's gallery of earnest city officials, long-winded local activists, unctuous consultants, wily bureaucrats, Native American hucksters, Vegas high-rollers and assorted eccentrics. This crowded field plays to one of Shearer's strengths as a writer: He's a master of the thumbnail sketch. But at times, entertaining and politically astute as it is, the novel seems to lack a center, a single character or relationship that the reader can track all the way from beginning to end.
Arriving on the heels of the Jack Abramoff scandal, Not Enough Indians may also suffer a bit in comparison to that epic tale of casino-related corruption. None of the characters in Shearer's novel seems as operatically venal as Abramoff or as nakedly hypocritical as Ralph Reed, the fallen choirboy of the Christian right. As Philip Roth pointed out way back in the '60s, American reality is always running a step or two ahead of the imagination of even our boldest novelists. ยท
Tom Perrotta is the author, most recently, of "Little Children."