The Death of Jim Loney [Hardcover]

James. Welch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1979

Jim Loney is a half-breed Indian living in a small Montana town. He's 35 years old, and he's slowly going mad. A compelling story of the modern American Indian, out of warpaint and costume, with no tribe and no home in nature or the cheap substitutes available to him.

--This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An undying story told with the austerity of Camus's The Stranger, of a wounded soul seeking to become whole."
-Ivan Doig

"The Death of Jim Loney is an American classic."
-William Kittredge --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

James Welch (1940-2003) is the author of five novels, including Fools Crow, which won the American Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He also wrote one work of nonfiction, Killing Custer, and a collection of poems, Riding the Earthboy 40. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: HarperCollins; First Edition edition (August 1979)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060805382
• ISBN-13: 978-0060805388
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,875,591 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful and poignant prose..., July 24, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (London, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Death of Jim Loney (Contemporary American fiction) (Mass Market Paperback)

Having read Fools Crow I was aware that James Welch has a wonderful way with words. However, I was unprepared for this book - it was like sitting in the head of the principal character, Jim Loney. I found myself so involved that I was willing Jim to come out of his predicament in one piece before I reached the back cover of the book. I don't want to give too much of the plot away, but I went through a roller-coaster of emotions reading this book. It brought to mind some people I knew, but I think that it was most poignant because I thought, 'a flame extinguished even before it had enough time to burn bright... at last he seems to have found some happiness.... why didn't they try harder to save him....why did he give up so easily, etc. etc.'It's a stark and wonderful story....read it!!!

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Concise, well-written, and effective, July 27, 2001

By 

LaLoren - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Death of Jim Loney (Contemporary American fiction) (Mass Market Paperback)

Reading this, I could not help making comparisons with the play, "Death of a Salesman." While James Welch may not appreciate his story of a half-breed American Indian being compared to a play about a very white, middle-class male, I found my reaction to both very similar. Despite the sense of doom, from the very beginning, I found myself foolishly hoping, as I did with Willy Loman, that Jim would latch on to one of the opportunities offered him, and change his fate. At the same time I knew that Jim, like Willy, was a finished product by the time I'd met him, and that simply changing locations (or jobs) would not make any real difference. Of course, Willy was more a product of his own choices, while Loney is more a product of other peoples'disregard. This is where the story of the white man and the Indian diverge.

Welch is an excellant writer. This book is concise and neat. Very little is extraneous or superfluous to the story. There are a couple of small flaws, however. While he does an excellent job of portraying the feelings and emotions of Loney's sister, I thought he did not do as good a job with his white girl friend. To me she came off just a bit one-dimensional, but then, it is often difficult for a male writer to explain the female side of a relationship. I also thought he could have done away with some of the explanations at the end regarding Indian alienation from the white culture, and Officer Painter's sudden realization of Loney's "plan." Perhaps Welch didn't trust in his own abilities to bring this out within the story, but he had already done an admirable job, and it didn't require repetition.

All in all, I would recommend this book very highly. You will probably end up, like I did, reading it in one night, and then wishing that you hadn't finished it so quickly, so that you would still have it to look forward to.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Lost . . ., August 12, 2009

By 

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Death of Jim Loney (Penguin Classics) (Paperback)

While the central character of this short novel, Jim Loney, is stricken with a loss of direction and purpose that suggests a death of the soul itself, the characters surrounding him are themselves unmoored and drifting in their own ways. Jim, cast adrift early in life as a throw-away child of an Indian mother and white father, believes that his life would take on meaning if only he knew more about his background. But being a "half-breed" merely deepens the confusion about his identity. His older sister, Kate, with a beltway job in Washington DC tries unsuccessfully to jump start his life, and partly as a result, begins to doubt that most Indians can be rescued from what amounts to a debilitating inertia.

Meanwhile, Jim's sometime girlfriend, Rhea, on the lam from an upper middle-class family in Dallas, has taken a teaching job in the northern Montana town of Harlem, where the story takes place, and abruptly quits in the middle of the school year to go back to Texas or to Seattle, she doesn't know where, and to do what, she isn't sure either. And a town cop, recently relocated from the Bay Area of California, decides after a bedding a few of the local women that small town life in the back of beyond is not to his liking. It is the late 1970s, in that period of post-Vietnam, pre-Reagan vagueness about national purpose and identity, and Jim Loney's lonely 35-year-old life settles sadly into an alcohol-soaked oblivion that drifts finally into an inevitable and violent ending.

Clearly and beautifully written, but without the humor in Welch's previous "Winter in the Blood," this novel is a melanchly portrayal of isolation and loss. And identifying with the central character, readers are likely to feel that they are watching a loved but frustratingly detached friend gradually slipping away.