The Fast Red Road

The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong serves as Stephen Graham Jones's debut novel written in 2000. He only started writing the book after being introduced to Houghton-Mifflin editor Janet Silver at a party and telling a complicated lie about a book he had written.

The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong
First Edition Cover
AuthorStephen Graham Jones
Cover artistJacket design by
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreNovel
PublisherFiction Collective 2
Publication date
2000
Media typePrint (Hardcover, Paperback)
Pages326 pp
Followed byAll The Beautiful Sinners 

It was originally titled Golius: A Failed Sestina and used as Stephen's dissertation while attending Florida State University. At the Writers' Harvest conference, his dissertation driector introduced him to editor Jane Silver. Jones pitched her the novel, which he had not yet written, and Silver liked the idea. [1]

Plot summary

The Fast Red Road—A Plainsong is a gleeful, two-fisted plundering of the myth and pop- culture surrounding the American Indian. It is a novel fueled on pot fumes and blues, a surreal pseudo-Western, in which imitation is the sincerest form of subversion. Indians, cowboys, and outlaws are as changeable as their outfits; horses are traded for Trans-Ams, and men are as likely to strike poses from Gunsmoke as they are from Custer’s last stand. Pidgin, the half-blood protagonist, inhabits a world of illusion—of aliens, ghosts, telekinesis, and water-pistol violence, where TV and porn offer redemption, and the Indian always gets it in the end. His attempts to reconcile the death of his father with five hundred years of colonial myth-making lead him to criss-cross a wasted New Mexico, returning compulsively to his hometown of Clovis, the site of his father’s burial.

Accompanied by car thief Charlie Ward, he evades the cops in a top-down drag race, tearing through barriers “Dukestyle.” The land they travel seems bent with fever—post-apocalyptic —as though the end has arrived and no one noticed. Its occupants hawk bodies and pastel bomb shelters, wandering a bleak hallucination of strip-joints, strip-malls, and all you can eat beef fed beef stalls. They speak a lingo of disposable nicknames, truncated punch lines—slang with an expiration date. Pidgin strays through bar and junkyards, rodeos and carnivals, encountering the remnants of the Goliard tribe. There’s the mysterious Mexican Paiute, Uncle Birdfinger, checkout-girl Stiya 6—the reincarnation of Pidgin’s mother—and media-queen Psychic Sally, who predicts the group’s demise. Each plays a part in the search that will eventually place Pidgin in a position to rewrite history.

Characters
Pidgin
Charlie Ward
Uncle Birdfinger
Stiya 6
Psychic Sally aka Big Springs Sally
Patience Patience
Bonita Bonito
Cline
Silky Bird
"Killer" Tom Black
[2]
Atticus Wean
Weanie The Horse
Litmus Jones
Marina Trigo

Awards and nominations

The novel won the following awards: Independent Publishers Award for Multicultural Fiction[3]

See also

References
  1. http://www.negativecapabilitypress.org/blog/2018/10/8/0ap74gmg8espqavvtcm68bozemh2rs
  2. A reference to Hal Borland's Tom Black from When The Legends Die
  3. IndependentPublisher.com
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.