Green Grass, Running Water

Lalage Grauer teaches English at Okanagan University College in Kelowna,
B.C.

“In the beginning, there was nothing. ... Coyote was there,” we are
told at the start of Thomas King’s second novel. When Coyote wakes
from a nap, the world is already there, ready to be supplemented,
whether through some purpose

of Coyote’s (selfish or benign) or by mistake. Through the figure of
Coyote, and his (or her, as it turns out) manifestations as ancient,
androgynous “Indians,” or as the Lone Ranger, Hawkeye, Ishmael, and
Robinson Crusoe, King conveys the anarchic, endlessly transforming
vitality of creation and destruction, which is the history of life on
earth. Since Coyote was always there, his/her story includes all
possibilities dreamt of by humans, including God, Robinson Crusoe, or
the present-day people and relationships that are the focus of this
novel. Green Grass, Running Water is often simultaneously hilarious and
revealing: King employs his familiar strategy of benevolent attire to
catch the inattentive, or perhaps jaded, reader off guard with serious
issues. His novel vividly presents social problems as large as genocide
and as small as urban beautification, within a comic, rather than a
tragic, mode that empowers women and Native peoples.

This novel is experimental in important ways. King uses Coyote to
create a playful postmodern discontinuity and randomness as a narrative
frame for contemporary relationships, such as the triangle of Alberta
and her two suitors, Lionel and Charlie. These seemingly postmodern
characteristics, however, also place the novel within Native
storytelling traditions. King’s use of the trickster figure connects
his novel to a tradition in which the story is not just about
Coyote—the story is Coyote. Depending on one’s familiarity with the
borders of storytelling King is working with, the novel can be read as a
postmodern metafiction, or as an encounter with the trickster in one of
his many transformations.