The writing [in Winter in the Blood] is constantly fending off easy attitudes and conclusions with a flat, brooding precision. The reader keeps wanting to be able to make something of it all, to be clear how these people are Indians, how being an Indian makes a difference. Welch himself is a Montanan, Blackfoot and Gros Ventre, and in Winter in the Blood one may find out what it is like to be an Indian, this Indian, but just what that means is never once offered us for summary or conclusion. It is an unnervingly beautiful book. (p. 20)

As one might imagine, there are fine conversations in bars, and they have just the right quality of aimlessness and direction of life being lived and not lived. (p. 21)

Writing as flat and quiet as this, in a novel that is mostly dialogue, tempts one to think of Hemingway, to...