Winter in the Blood by James Welch (4 stars)

This is a powerful novel, but it is hard to like. Welch is Native American and writes a bleak story of a Native American man stumbling through life, clashing culturally as he moves between the nearby white town and his rural life on a farm. The writing reminded me of Cormac McCarthy:

On it were written the name, John First Raise, and a pair of dates between which he had managed to stay alive.

He has a series of surreal, dreamlike conversations in various seedy bars, and gets mixed up in multiple criminal dealings and fights for no obvious reason apart from feeling detached from life and alien inside this community.

Again I felt that helplessness of being in a world of stalking white men. But those Indians down at Gable's were no bargain either. I was a stranger to both and both had beaten me.

The narration is distant, so I never really felt like I knew the main (unnamed) character, I was mostly just left with a sense of a life with many permanent holes that were far from being filled by a series of sexual encounters with lonely women.

I struggled with rating this book, but I'm giving it 4 stars because I still remember the lost feeling it gave me.

4 stars