James Welch's fine novel, Winter in the Blood, the story of a 32-year-old Indian on a Montana reservation, depends upon understatement, requires it, would be impossible to tell without its restraint. For the story of Indian dispossession is stark and terrible, and, unlike science fiction, true…. The story implicates victor and vanquished in a shared guilt, the white man for having aggressed, the red man for having succumbed. Whatever the reasons or the excuses, the consequences remain inexcusable. The consequences are here in the book, in the narrator's bruised body and defeated spirit, and in the writer's grace. James Welch is not his protagonist, and that must remain a sole and important consolation. The novel begins with an image of dilapidation, the Earthboy place in shambles…. We are accustomed to speak of alienation as the pervasive theme of twentieth-century American fiction, but the alienation of the middle-class white...