SOURCE: "Death of Love/Love of Death: Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead," in MELUS, Vol. 21, No. 2, Summer, 1996, pp. 141-56.

In the following essay, St. Clair discusses the wasteland of contemporary America as portrayed by Silko's Almanac of the Dead, yet acknowledges the expression of hope contained in the conclusion of the novel.

Leslie Marmon Silko's second novel, Almanac of the Dead, portrays a nightmarish wasteland of violence, bestiality, cruelty, and crime. Deformed by grotesque familial relationships and debauched by sexual perversion, its characters are incapable of love. Even more chillingly, they seem—except for a few enraged revolutionaries—incapableeven of hatred. Almanac reveals an utterly amoral and atomized society in which each isolated member is indifferent to everything but the gratifications of his own enervated passions. He is connected to nothing: all existence outside himself is reduced to a stock of commodities for which he must...