Oklahoma Odyssey: A Novel by John Mort (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Oklahoma Odyssey: A Novel by John Mort Steve Yates John Mort, Oklahoma Odyssey: A Novel. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2022. 324 pp. Paper, $24.95; e-book, $24.95. There should be an official novel form delineated to describe a fiction in which a carnival of characters from all around a countryside collide with neighbors and a few outworlders in one grand event. “Kermesse” feels right, especially after reading John Mort’s novel Oklahoma Odyssey, which is Brueghel-like in its masterful balance of detail and sketch, its sweeping management of characters and setting, and its energetic capture of seething motion. Many novels hinge on some country fair or mass human event that sets the action off or culminates it. Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, or Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March, or John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing, or Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian spring to mind. Border crossings and life changings coruscate when these carnivalesque happenings—the last gasps of an empire, the last buffalo hunt, one of the last Indian massacres—go down. Tribes crash together in a frenzy sometimes as devouring as Judge Holden’s dance, but always dizzying and, eventually, fatefully reorienting. Oklahoma Odyssey is a kermesse novel, then, a tale of the last land run into Oklahoma at its border with Kansas. Everyone hurries and kicks to make “the best of a piece of bad luck,” as occasional protagonist, Ulysses Kreider, sums up his life (306). [End Page 167] The grand event of that final land run serves as both backdrop and driver. United States cavalry sweep out Cherokees and squatters, including bad guy Eddie Mole. Mort deploys a number of moves antithetical to the traditional genre Western, among them the infrequency of Mole’s appearances. Mole murders Ulysses “Euly” Kreider’s father in the opening scene then flees, remaining a storm cloud on the horizon throughout. This meteorological distancing prevents the villain from becoming the most interesting character and ensures that his criminality lacks romance. In a kermesse novel, it is sometimes hard to identify one protagonist. There can be and maybe there always should be many compelling characters. Mort positions each at a precarious borderland externally and internally. Euly is Mennonite, of German-speaking Ukrainian immigrant stock, but his apostate and ambitious father, a tireless freight hauler, ran whiskey. Euly’s “cousin” Kate, adopted by Uncle Helmut and Aunt Annelise, wonders whether she is part Black or part Osage, artist or Mennonite. Her beloved, Johnny Heart of Oak, is Osage but adopted and raised Mennonite. He bears name and traits, good and bad, from both tribes. Even the times these characters inhabit prove liminal. The novel begins in 1892 when the buffalo seem but a memory and the automobile but a rumor. Mort creates unforgettable settings and situations. Kate, with a partial inheritance, travels to grindingly urban Kansas City. Rather than solely focus on business school (a modern answer to the Mennonite maxim “Life is Work”) she also paints and sketches. After a schoolmate and erudite Northeastern homosexual male tags her as not white, she crosses another border for inspiration. She dons trousers to sketch and paint the Blacks of a slum, Mississippi Town. Her struggles as an artist exploiting other people of color and selling the resultant art in a nascent marketplace make for extraordinary, thought-provoking reading. Johnny, a boarding school–educated orphan, strives to achieve a “worthiness” to marry Kate. The values pushing him are both Mennonite and Osage. In his quest, he returns to his tribe. Mort’s writing among the Osage characters sparkles with revelation. There is a kind of last buffalo hunt, and it’s too fitting not to mention the title of one of Mort’s listed sources, The Osages: Children of the [End Page 168] Middle Waters. Johnny seems just that, understanding Jesus but praisingWah-Kon-Da. The land run in the final act of the five is as well a rousing and memorable read, swirling all three major characters in a collision with Mole and their destinies. Here Mort demonstrates the thrills, tensions, and joys in his formidable kit of writing skills. If he wished to write the...