SOURCE: "The Ventriloquist," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 16, 1997, p. 13.

[In the following review of Cloud Chamber, Houston concentrates on Dorris's storytelling technique.]

Michael Dorris' new novel, Cloud Chamber, confirms everything I suspected after reading A Yellow Raft in Blue Water: that he is one of the true masters of voice, of character and of storytelling in contemporary American literature. As comfortable in the voice of a consumptive teenage girl as he is in the voice of a black waiter in a German officers' club, as at home with the Irish landscape as he is with rural Kentucky and Montana's Great Plains, Dorris weaves five generations, at least that many ethnicities and three times that many locales into a cohesive and satisfying narrative—made all the more satisfying by its vastness and scope.

Cloud Chamber is a novel that begins in a pub in turn-of-the-century Ireland and...