New West Book Review

Off the Rez: Toni Jensen’s “From the Hilltop”

By Jenny Shank, 3-01-10

From the Hilltop
by Toni Jensen
University of Nebraska Press, 180 pages, $19.95

In Toni Jensen’s first story collection, From the Hilltop, many of the characters are Native American, some sharing the author’s Métis background, living in places where they stick out, such as West Texas, where a Blackfoot father and his Blackfoot-Comanche son run a hotel that the locals dub the “Powwow Hotel,” or in Minnesota, where we meet an adopted Blackfoot teenage girl who longs to be crowned a Dairy Princess at the Minnesota State Fair.  She’s interested in statistics, and enumerates her situation frankly:

“I was almost a dairy princess, was runner-up in my county, which borders Canada.  The whole county has only 1,882 residents, 978 of them female, 143 who are between the ages of fifteen and twenty-one, the proper dairy princess age range.  Of those 143, all are white, except me; I’m an Indian, Blackfoot, the only one in the county.”

Of the six applicants, the narrator lost out to a girl her mother calls her “arch nemesis,” and she heads down to the fair to see her rival’s head sculpted in butter along with the other county dairy princesses.

Quirky details, like those butter head sculptures, make Jensen’s stories memorable.  In “At the Powwow Hotel,” a crop of corn is mysteriously moving south down the continent, appearing in one location and then disappearing and turning up in another.  Everywhere the corn goes, dozens of Indians of all different tribes follow it, and it shows up in West Texas just at the right time for the hotel’s owner, who is mourning the loss of his wife.  (This story, one of the best in the collection, was anthologized in New Stories from the South and New Stories from the Southwest.)

In “Learning How to Drown,” a community college teacher loses his job over his romance with a student, with whom he spends hours every night, but, as it turns out, they never actually do anything but watch T.V.  One horrible detail that will linger in the reader’s mind occurs in “Flight,” in which a “mislabeled jug of cleaning solution used to sanitize toothbrush handles at the Head Start” poisons a group of preschoolers, leaving the narrator’s brother spinning in “left-leaning circles.”

In her acknowledgments, Jensen sites Louise Erdrich as an influence, and Jensen’s stories share some qualities in common with Erdrich’s.  Jensen’s fiction, like Erdrich’s, often includes romance gone wrong, Indian or part Indian characters trying to find their way in non-Indian society, plenty of humorous moments, and occasional elements of magical realism. 

But Jensen’s stories are also distinctive, and this is especially true of the moving “From the Hilltop,” in which Jensen employs a unique narrative technique to communicate a man’s stunned response to an accident that left his brother in a coma.  The narrator goes over the what-ifs of the day his brother fell off the roof of an abandoned hotel, trying to imagine how it could have turned out differently.  The story begins:

“If the hotel roof had been any hotter, if it had been any higher, if I had fallen, too, or instead; if Bean had officially died, if we had been drinking less or more, if there had been more than one girl there, if there had been fewer than us four guys, if we had all listened to Jeffrey, who is a biology professor now, the only one who got out, who was always worth listening to, who was hated, a little, for it”

Jensen’s unorthodox approach with the narration—leaving the ends of sentences unpunctuated, fragments of thoughts that can never be completed—elegantly captures the endless, torturous loop of the narrator’s thoughts.  This technique illuminates how people suffering such losses can’t escape the idea that if one action a series were changed, a terrible outcome could have been averted.

Occasionally Jensen’s stories have scenes that seem needlessly cryptic.  After reading them several times, I still can’t figure out exactly what happened at the end of “Butter” or “Flight"—though that could have more to do with my skills as a reader than Jensen’s as a writer.  But leaning on the side of subtlety rather than over-explanation is a strategy that should serve Jensen well in a career that will hopefully produce many more accomplished books like From the Hilltop.

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