How the Night is Divided

In his first novel, poet Matlin ( Dressed in Protective Fashion ) explores with almost mystical intensity a clash of cultures. Tom Green, a Kiowa Indian whose parents fled the Depression-era Oklahoma dust storms, works on a rose-breeding farm in southern California, circa 1950. His employer and friends are hardy Jewish immigrants, many of whom speak fluent Russian, Hebrew and Spanish. As Tom encounters inner voices and makes contact with his tribe's ancestral spirits, he comes to understand and even identify with Jewish farmers whose relatives perished in the Nazi death camps. Tom's tender love affair with Hollywood actress Anna, the daughter of German-Jewish refugees, is not fully explored, nor does the novel's other principal female character--a proud woman of Aztec blood who feels choked by her husband's devotion to horticulture--come completely to life. But Matlin's introspective prose is haunting, evoking the Southwest as a vortex within which whirl atomic bomb tests, B-52 overflights, Tennessee Ernie Ford's crooning, Senator Joseph McCarthy, ecological consciousness, Jewish pioneering dreams and Native American visions. ( May )