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Introduction: Michael Dorris' Cloud Chamber
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16208 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1997 |
324 Words |
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All of us make decisions about our lives that affect our descendants generations later. Michael Dorris' perceptive new novel, Cloud Chamber, opens with just such a moment in the life of seventeen-year-old Rose Mannion, "a force to behold" in nineteenth-century County Roscommon, Ireland. This chapter of the book is featured as Book World's excerpt this month.
An anthropologist before he became a novelist, Dorris won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Broken Cord, a nonfictional work about the fetal alcohol syndrome that afflicted his adopted son. Dorris is also the author of the highly praised novel A Yellow Raft in Blue Water; numerous nonfiction works (including Rooms in the House of Stone and Paper Trail); three novels for young adults (Morning Girl, Guests, and Sees behind Trees); and a collection of short stories (Working Men). He and his wife, Louise Erdrich, coauthored the novel The Crown of Columbus.
Cloud Chamber traces the history of the central family in A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. Dorris reveals much more than the origins of Rayona's Irish spirit and Afro-Siouxish features, however. Eight contrasting voices narrate the memories and myths of five generations, revealing familial patterns--legacies of deceit, betrayal, determination, and love that are played out in generation after generation.
Commentator Jay Parini writes that the author "draws a picture of family life in which departed members continue to hover, as guiding spirits, beside current figures. ... [Cloud Chamber] demonstrates the value of remembering the names of the lost, their lives and hopes." Like William Faulkner, Parini adds, Michael
... (2000 of 1997 Characters)
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