Sweetbitter

The first hardcover fiction release from Broken Moon is a promising debut on both counts. Poet Gibbons (Five Pears or Peaches), who is also the editor of TriQuarterly, has written a sweeping yet intimate first novel that tells the story of the Choctaw Indians through the troubled life of one Reuben S. Sweetbitter, half Choctaw, half white. Set around the turn of the century, the story focuses on the protagonist's experience of racism. When his mother dies as they're heading west from Mississippi, young Reuben must make his own way in the world and eventually lands in East Texas. There, he learns that he fits in nowhere-neither among Indians nor ``coloreds,'' and certainly not among whites. Trouble is assured when, in 1910, Reuben falls in love with Martha Clarke, the white daughter of a local lawyer. Threatened with a lynching for their act of miscegenation, the couple flees. For a time, they live in peace, but the pursuit by whites bent on racial purity never stops and, finally, an inevitable day of reckoning arrives. Gibbons artfully combines Choctaw myth and history with Reuben's personal search for identity. Though greater use of dialogue would have enlivened the narrative, his graceful and evocative prose makes this an absorbing story. (Sept.)