Killing Time with Strangers (Sun Tracks: An American Indian Literary Series, Vol. 45) [Hardcover]

W. S. Penn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 2000

Young Pal needs help with his dreaming.

Palimony Blue Larue, a mixblood growing up in a small California town, suffers from a painful shyness and wants more than anything to be liked. That's why Mary Blue, his Nez Perce mother, has dreamed the weyekin, the spirit guide, to help her bring into the world the one lasting love her son needs to overcome the diffidence that runs so deep in his blood. The magical (and not totally competent) weyekin pops in and out of Pal's life at the most unexpected times—and in the most unlikely guises—but seems to have difficulty setting him on the right path. Is there any hope for Palimony Blue?

Don't ask his father, La Vent Larue; La Vent is past hope, past help, a city zoning planner and a pawn in the mayor's development plans who ends up crazy and in jail after he shoots the mayor in the—well, never mind. Better to ask Pal's mother, who summons the weyekin when she isn't working on a cradle board for Pal and his inevitable bride. And while you're at it, ask the women in Pal's life: Sally the preacher's daughter, Brandy the waitressing flautist, Tara the spoiled socialite. And be sure to ask Amanda, if you can catch her. If you can dream her.

Using comic vision to address serious concerns of living, Penn has written a freewheeling novel that will surpass most readers' expectations of "ethnic fiction." Instead of the usual polemics, it's marked by a sense of humor and a playfulness of language that springs directly from Native American oral tradition.

What more can be said about a book that has to be read to the end in order to get to the beginning? That Killing Time with Strangers is unlike any novel you have read before? Or perhaps that it is agonizingly familiar, giving us glimpses of a young man finding his precarious way in life? But when the power of dreaming is unleashed, time becomes negotiable and life's joys and sorrows go up for grabs. And as sure as yellow butterflies will morph into Post-It notes, you will know you have experienced a new and utterly captivating way of looking at the world.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Magical realism is an excellent way to tell love stories in this disenchanted age, and Penn's new novel delves into that realm using a shape-shifting spirit, a weyekin, to describe how Palimony Blue Larue meets his destined love, Amanda. The weyekin was dreamed into existence by Pal's mother, Mary Blue, a young Nez Perc? woman. While working in a kitchen in a Mexican diner in California, Mary meets and marries the ambitious La Vent Larue, a mixed-blood Osage college student from a long line of failed men, who's determined to be the success in his family. His job as an urban planner assisting the mayor of Gilroy, Calif., requires him to expedite a series of unconscionable projects, such as removing an Indian burial ground to make way for a shopping center. Mary Blue turns away from her compromised husband and conjures up the weyekins, spirits who take the form of magical companions (named Chingaro, Parker, Hinmot) to guide her son, Palimony, to Amanda. Mary had named her son "Palomino," but the white nurse had intentionally changed the name on his birth certificate. That incident turned out to be emblematic of Pal's misbegotten future relationships with women. With his father descending into madness, Pal grows up different in both skin color and spirit from his white classmates. His main shortcoming, in Mary's opinion, is his irrepressible desire to be liked, causing him to fall for impossibly inappropriate women: a zealous Christian named Sally Pedon, a musician/waitress named Brandy and the beautiful, wealthy and unscrupulous Tara Dunnahowe. These teenage escapades provide some of the more entertaining moments in Penn's dreamscape. Through the lens of Pal's erotic itinerary, Penn creates a novel satirizing Californian mores as it balances personal, soulful dreams against that big one: the American dream. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Told from the perspective of his weyekin, or spirit guide, this whimsical tale of Palimony Blue Larue's life is one young man's odyssey of self-discovery. As a mixed-blood in contemporary society (his mother was a Nez Perce), Pal is lost until he connects with his Native roots and begins dreaming his own life, slowly shucking off the dreams society has established for him. With tongue firmly in cheek, Penn (The Absence of Angels) has the weyekin turn up in the most unlikely of guises to guide Pal as he stumbles from one loveless relationship to another. Pal recognizes his weyekin in a hobo camp, a dead body, and a crucified squirrel, as well as in brief meetings with many colorful bystanders. Penn's deft and delicate prose moves us easily through real and magical worlds. Some of his images are a bit obvious and heavy-handed, but this drawback is overshadowed by his sly humor and the clear picture that emerges of how an "outsider" can drown in his own lack of confidence or die from wanting to be liked too much. Recommended for both public and academic libraries, as well as Native American fiction collections everywhere.DMary A. Stout, Pima Community Coll. Lib., Tucson
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 283 pages
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press (July 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0816520526
• ISBN-13: 978-0816520527
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,726,657 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My Personal Favorite, April 3, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Killing Time with Strangers (Sun Tracks: An American Indian Literary Series, Vol. 45) (Hardcover)

I was impressed by W.S. Penn's Killing Time with Strangers. I thought the author was witty, intellegent, and understanding. The characters in the book were well developed, as was the plot of the story. I would be forced to disagree with anyone who rated this book less than a 5, for I have not only bought this book for myself, but also for my friends and family as gifts. This book has everything, romance, adventure, and a part of all of us that connot be left out. The author has a unique understanding of humanity, and therefore, his story telling is enhanced. This book can be enjoyed by everyone, no matter what their character. I was so happy that this book won last year's American Book Award, (obviously this proves my point about this being a good book). After reading this book, I know you will rush out to buy all of W.S. Penn's books.I reccomend this book over all other books on this website. Thank you all for your time.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dreaming your reality, May 16, 2001

By 

Pam Hanna "wind star" (Thoreau, New Mexico United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Killing Time with Strangers (Sun Tracks: An American Indian Literary Series, Vol. 45) (Hardcover)

After reading this book, I think that Magical Realism, Native American style, may catch on as a distinct genre. The author, an "urban mixblood Nex Perce" is an English professor and it shows through in echoes from classical literature, but Penn also includes the classics of the Americas (such as the Popul Vuh) which makes this work unique and why I think that Penn may have opened up a whole new genre (if anybody can follow this act).

"Without storytelling, human beings don't exist" says Penn's narrator (a "Wyekin" or spirit guide, who, in his comic incopetence reminds me of Ed's Indian spirit guide in TV's "Northern Exposure").

This is the story of Palimony Blue Larue, son of Mary Blue and La Vent Larue, misnamed in the hospital becuase a nurse couldn't imagine anybody naming thier kid "Palomino" after a horse! So Pal goes through life trying to please and be liked as his father before him did, while his mother and her Weyekin spirit guide try to prevent him from making his father's mistakes and teach him how to dream his way out of the white world. His mother didn't want him in their world. Says Mary Blue, "I want him to envision and make a world of his own in which they are not foolish but all their knowledge and instinct don't matter because they don't have any effect."

This must have been the spirit that prompted the famous Ghost Dance.

Pal's mother, Mary Blue, is the spider woman on the set, goddess of wisdom and time, endlessly beading and feeding strangers and friends the way Penelope did - or one of the Fates. She has "...years of her Dreamer's practice at harmony, at the balance that comes from not judging until it's time and even when it became time, ususally not judging the person but maybe the results, and not harshly, which came full circle from the balance achieved by not judging, but putting the thing itself in perspective, by connecting it to five hundred years of human activity and thought, by seeing that very little about real human beings really changes. Once you realize that, once you learn to dream, which helps to create that realization, you gain humor - sometimes, outright laughter - but always the humor that is the resilience of survival."

How much of this is like the Australian aboriginal dreamtime, I wonder?

Pal gradually catches on, but with his own spin. His yellow butterflies become post-it notes by which he dreams his ideal woman, Amanda, into existence. But Amanda does declare towards the end of the book that "I'm real." Not something Pal dreamed. "Dreaming is an imaginative act. But it's very real," he says. "Like telling stories. The Navajo beleive that by articulating something, putting it into words, you actually make it exist. You bring it into being. Dreaming's like that. It makes things exist by imagining them with power. It makes them exist by imagining a world in which they mean a lot."

Pal's epiphany comes when he burns his post-it notes and says they're "dead lectures...names and dates and questions that have to mean what people have already decided they have to mean. Not a single hidden meaning in one of them. Nothing that lets you glimpse the other side of things or look for what's behind or between the words, like stories."

Besides the classical references, there are echoes of other authors in this work - Erdrich and Silko, Anaya and even Alexie - but Penn still has his own voice. He could have used a better editor who would have weeded out sentences such as, "Odd how they don't want their listeners to take part in how their stories make the world, though, isn't it?" which is simplistic at best and patronizing at worst. And you have to connect the dots and pay attention or else you have to go back and check the author's definition of terms. But it's worth it for the world view.

I'm making this work sound like a literary exercise - which it isn't. It's an entertaining story, but you have to pay attention or miss the point. You have to read it to the end to get to the beginning. So it's not light reading. But again, it's worth it.

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5.0 out of 5 stars very interesting, May 13, 2007

By 

liala_daerjon "liz" (honolulu, HI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Killing Time with Strangers (Sun Tracks) (Paperback)

This is a book about dreaming. In native north american culture folks "dreamed" their lives. this is an excellent portrayal of this in (basically) present time case. This book conveys examples to some of the plights current youths face, having split up and mixed backrounds in native american heritage. But also the fading way of dreamers, people who IMAGINED life before letting it happen. Highly recommended if you have read anything about dreaming, also recommended if you know nothing about it but are open to the idea that reality is what you make it. A wonderful story stand-alone as well.