Madchild Running

Levi Shea, the protagonist of this gritty, slow-moving first novel, is in the business of helping people, working at a social-service agency in Seattle. A mixed-blood Northwest Coast Indian raised by a white family near Tacoma, Levi himself is barely hanging on. An alcoholic with a troubled past, he is trying to atone by working with individuals as dysfunctional as he has been. But the daily strain of social work, watching people consume their last ounces of energy and dignity just to venture into his office, is more than he can handle. Having absorbed and internalized their anger, he is at the breaking point when he is asked to supervise the case of Nicki Sanders, a preteen from a violent and alcoholic family who has been in and out of foster care. Streetwise, suicidal and heartbreakingly vulnerable, Nicki gets to Levi, becoming both a cause and a lifeline for him. He is determined to save her and maybe--just maybe--himself in the process. Egawa, a Lummi Indian from Seattle, knows his characters and his territory. He captures the milieu of many poor, drifting urban Native Americans with a sharp eye for telling detail and a deep understanding of underlying causes and motivations (""Anger is passed on easy as eye color. Anger comes without effort. Sadness turns to anger, loss turns to anger, shame turns to anger""). His relentless cataloguing of routine social service work is at times more numbing than illuminating, however, and his detached narrative style makes it difficult to engage with the protagonists. Still, Egawa never shrinks from the harsh realities he describes, and readers unfamiliar with the lot of this tragically disadvantaged population will learn much from his uncompromising tale. (Oct.)