The Sharpest Sight by Louis Owens
**Overview of "The Sharpest Sight" by Louis Owens**
"The Sharpest Sight" is a novel that intertwines a murder mystery with profound explorations of identity and heritage, particularly focusing on individuals of mixed ancestry in a predominantly white society. Centered around Mundo Morales, a deputy sheriff in Amarga, California, the narrative opens with the discovery of a body in the Salinas River, leading to a quest for truth that delves into the complexities of American Indian identity and the legacy of the Vietnam War. The plot thickens as Mundo investigates the murder of his childhood friend, Attis McCurtain, who had struggled with the trauma of war and mental health challenges.
As the investigation unfolds, it highlights the intergenerational struggles of families grappling with their cultural ties and the societal pressures that come with mixed heritage. The novel introduces characters like Uncle Luther, a Choctaw elder with supernatural insights, and Cole McCurtain, who embarks on a journey of self-discovery. The narrative employs elements of Magic Realism, allowing dialogues between the living and the dead, which enrich the thematic layers of identity, trauma, and cultural wisdom.
Through its intricate storytelling, "The Sharpest Sight" not only addresses the immediate mystery but also reflects on broader themes of violence, loss, and the quest for belonging within a fractured cultural landscape. The novel invites readers to contemplate the significance of heritage and the enduring impacts of history on contemporary lives.
The Sharpest Sight by Louis Owens
First published: 1992
Type of plot: Detective and mystery
Time of work: The early 1970’s
Locale: California and Mississippi
Principal Characters:
Ramon Mundo Morales , a deputy sheriffGloria Morales , his wifeAttis McCurtain , a Vietnam veteran, part Choctaw and Cherokee, part IrishCole McCurtain , his brotherHoey McCurtain , their father, part Irish, part ChoctawLuther , an aged Mississippi swamp dweller, Hoey McCurtain’s Choctaw uncleOnatima , his friend, sometimes called Old Lady Blue WoodJessard Deal , a tavern owner, also a Vietnam veteranLee Scott , an FBI agentDan Nemi , a rancher, the wealthiest landowner in the countyDiana Nemi , his daughter
The Novel
Although the plot of The Sharpest Sight involves a double murder mystery, the novel is far more than a whodunit, as it concerns several people of mixed ancestry who have to discover and come to terms with their identity, acknowledge their American Indian heritage, its values and meaning, and the position of Indians in a predominantly white society. The novel also deals with the trauma of the Vietnam War on its walking wounded.
The narrative opens with Mundo Morales, deputy sheriff of Amarga, California, driving his rounds on a night when it is raining so hard that the ordinarily dry Salinas River is flooding. Mundo thinks he sees a panther in his headlights, but when he gets out to investigate, he catches a glimpse of a dead body being tossed in the churning waters. It is his best friend, Attis McCurtain. They had grown up together, played basketball together, and gone to Vietnam together. While Mundo made a shaky adjustment back to American life, however, Attis cracked up, stabbed his girlfriend, Jenna Nemi, to death, and was institutionalized in the local hospital for the criminally insane. No one except Mundo, Attis’s father and brother, and the murderer now believe that Attis is dead; everyone else with an interest in him insists that he escaped from the asylum and is on the run. Mundo cannot find the body, but he is sure that whoever cut the fence wires and helped Attis to escape did so in order to kill him. The likeliest suspect is Dan Nemi, the father of the murdered daughter. So thinks Hoey McCurtain, Attis’s father, who in turn is gunning for Dan to avenge his son’s murder. Mundo therefore has to solve one murder while preventing another.
The authorities have vested interests in killing the case, however, and want Mundo to shut down his investigation altogether. Since Attis was a veteran and escaped from a veterans’ hospital, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) enters the scene in the person of Lee Scott, a singularly obnoxious agent who boasts of being a Vietnam veteran who had no trouble adjusting to civilian life. The FBI and government seek to prevent any embarrassing negative publicity about Attis as a psychological casualty of the war, which is still going on. The sheriff wants to protect Dan Nemi, the wealthiest and most powerful man in the county, and threatens to discharge Mundo and send him back to his former job as janitor, the best work he could find after coming home from Vietnam. If Mundo is to pursue the case, he must do so on his own time.
Just as the Salinas River runs deep underground when it is dry on the surface, there are mysteries beyond the murder mystery, for Hoey McCurtain’s Uncle Luther, an ancient Choctaw who lives in a swamp by the Yazoo River in Mississippi, has second sight that lets him know not only what has happened two thousand miles away but also what may happen in the future. Furthermore, Luther has a visitor in his cabin, the ghost of the murdered Attis, who cannot rest until his body has been found and given proper burial. In California, Mundo also receives occasional visits from the ghost of his grandfather. With these supernatural visitations, the novel moves from a Tony Hillerman-style murder mystery involving Indian heritage and part-Indian police into the realm of Magic Realism, as the living have dialogues with the dead and dream visions may be more real than waking sight.
Attis’s younger brother, Cole, must visit that realm, both to discover his own identity and to enable his brother’s spirit to rest. Cole has received a draft notice, but after his brother’s experience, he resists going to Vietnam. His father sends him to Mississippi, both to find refuge in the swamp and to learn from Uncle Luther. Luther, in turn, learns from his college-educated friend Onatima, a venerable Choctaw whom he calls Lady Blue Wood, who blends traditional wisdom with that of great literature.
The title comes from a passage by the eighteenth century Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards: “The arrows of death fly unseen at noon-day; the sharpest sight can’t discern them.” Despite his best efforts, Mundo never really proves who murdered Attis; probably it was not Dan Nemi. For a while, it looks as if it might be Dan’s oversexed daughter Diana, who seduces Cole, tries to seduce Mundo, and boasts of having made love to Attis in the bed of Attis’s lover, her murdered sister. Perhaps it is the psychopathic tavern owner Jessard Deal, another of the walking wounded from Vietnam, who periodically goes berserk and attacks his customers. The novel ends in an explosion of violence that leaves the question of Attis’s murder moot. As the FBI agent says, it no longer matters who killed Attis any more than it does who killed the soldiers in body bags in Vietnam. Cole, however, succeeds in finding the body and taking it back to Mississippi so that his brother’s bones can rest with his ancestors and his ghost can be released.
The Characters
Though much of the story is told from the perspective of Mundo Morales, he does not dominate it, for the narrative shifts back and forth among him, Cole McCurtain, and Uncle Luther; one chapter is even told from the point of view of the corpse. A veteran of Vietnam, Mundo has a shaky position as a deputy sheriff; his boss threatens to throw him back to being a janitor if he persists in asserting himself instead of being a docile subordinate. Despite opposition from all the authorities, he continues his investigation with intelligence and tenacity. Mundo’s Mexican ancestors once owned all the land in the Salinas Valley; now most of it belongs to Dan Nemi, the chief suspect in the murder. Yet Mundo does not feel sorry for himself; he has a good marriage and self-respect, and he comes to appreciate the part-Indian ancestry that he shares with the McCurtains.
Hoey McCurtain’s Irish father would not let him speak the language of his Choctaw mother and labeled him “white” on his birth certificate, but Hoey has chosen to consider himself an Indian and to direct his son Cole back to his roots. Cole could pass for white yet has not only a Choctaw grandmother but also a Cherokee mother; it is by learning the lessons of the Choctaw shamans that he finds himself and allays his murdered brother’s troubled spirit. Diana Nemi, the white teenage princess, is addicted to having sex with Indians as a substitute for finding her own identity. The ghost of Mundo’s grandfather calls her a witch, a “bruja.” Hoey’s Uncle Luther and his friend Onatima express most of the wisdom (as well as the humor) of the novel as they explore with Cole the significance of Indian values and the nature of the evil running amok in a world out of balance. Jessard Deal, the enormous, violent, poetry-quoting tavern owner, alludes to Jonathan Edwards, believes in innate depravity, and manifests it in his own actions.
Critical Context
The Sharpest Sight is volume 1 in the University of Oklahoma’s American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series, which also includes Louis Owens’s Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (1992). Owens, a professor of literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz, is a specialist on the work of John Steinbeck and coauthor with Tom Colonnese of American Indian Novelists: An Annotated Critical Bibliography (1985). The Sharpest Sight, his first novel, reflects his own mixed Choctaw, Cherokee, and Irish ancestry. In it, he combines ingredients from Tony Hillerman, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, and the Magic Realism of Latin American novelists to come up with a work that is strikingly original.
The Indian protagonists and their cultural background resemble those of Hillerman, but with Choctaws and Cherokees rather than Navajos. The California episodes take place in Steinbeck country and show how the Chumash Indians had their lands stolen by Mexican settlers, who in turn were dispossessed by aggressive white invaders. In the Southeast, the five civilized tribes had their land stolen and were sent west on death marches in the 1830’s. The Mississippi episodes not only take place in Faulkner country but also have Uncle Luther allude to Ikkemotube, or Doom, the Indian chief who features in a number of Faulkner’s fictions.
Onatima brings Luther books of literature so that he will turn from Westerns to the stories that count, the ones that change the world. At the moment, she is reading Thomas Pynchon. She is worried that white people, with no homes, no roots, and no concern for the earth, make heroes of immature people who perpetrate senseless violence. Among the more amusing as well as enlightening parts of the novel are Luther’s Choctaw explications of Moby Dick: Or, the Whale (1851) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The Choctaws also have their own stories to give words to the spiritual dangers in the world. Yet literature is not enough, for Jessard Deal throws out allusions to poetry while committing atrocities. Attis believed that “we have to accept responsibility for our lives, for everything within us and around us.” Tragically, Vietnam derailed him from doing this.
Bibliography
Cunningham, Lisa. Review of Other Destinies, by Louis Owens. American Studies International 36 (February, 1998): 93-94. A critical work by Owens that discusses the works by a variety of Native American authors. Although this work does not cover Owens’s fiction, it provides valuable insight into the role of American Indian fiction in the American canon.
Gish, Robert F. “The Sharpest Sight, a Novel.” The American Indian Quarterly 17 (Summer, 1993): 433-444. Discusses how Owens mixes realism and Magical Realism, as well as the Western and mystery genres, to create a novel that mirrors Native American experience.
Jakowski, H. Review of The Sharpest Sight, by Louis Owens. Choice 29 (June, 1992): 1546. Though he calls the landscape a “palpable character” in the narrative, Jakowski misplaces the Mississippi sequences in Arkansas. He praises Owens’s “lyrical prose” and calls the novel “a graceful literary production” that he compares to the poetry of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Hart Crane.
Mitten, Lisa A. Review of The Sharpest Sight, by Louis Owens. Library Journal 117 (January, 1992): 176. Mitten calls the narrative a voyage to discover the self and the false divisions between this world and the spirit world. She praises Owens’s work as “a fine inaugural novel” for the beginning of the Oklahoma series on the American Indian.
Paulson, Gary. “Noonday Arrows of Death.” Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 21, 1992, 12. Paulson, a novelist himself, praises Owens’s novel as a mystery but shows how it extends the genre into a serious, even philosophical work that investigates “the relationship of Anglo literature to Native America.” Yet he consistently confuses the Choctaw Indians of the novel with the Chickasaws.
Seaman, Donna. Review of The Sharpest Sight, by Louis Owens. Booklist 88 (February 15, 1992): 1089. In its study of the destruction of the Indian nations and the evil of Vietnam, Seaman finds Owens’s novel “a wise and poetic tale set to the seductively enigmatic music of magic and dreams.”
Vizenor, Gerald. “Authored Animals: Creature Tropes in Native American Fiction.” Social Research 62 (Fall, 1995): 661-683. Vizenor explores the ways in which animals are used as tropes in American Indian fiction. He asserts that the animals portrayed in Native American fiction are rarely literal representations, but function metaphorically. Works discussed include Owens’s Bone Game and The Sharpest Sight.