Flutie Moses is the thirteen-year-old daughter of a Cherokee father and a mother of German ancestry. Her brother, Franklin, is five years her senior. Both Franklin and the father work at Hampton's Garage, where they are pretty good mechanics. The mother is something of a volatile hellion, constantly in a state of nervous agitiation, though the source of her personality is never truly explained (she neither parties much nor chases men, the usual fountainheads, but she does regularly receive speeding tickets, and throws a fit of fury once her driver's license is finally revoked). The Moses clan is poor—"Nothing else could be counted on. Except poverty..."; "Flutie's father wouldn't let up. If Franklin finished high school, he could go to college and learn accounting. Then, they could buy the garage and run it. They wouldn't always be at a loss."; "Flutie realized they didn't have any money. But maybe they could get it." And most tellingly:

They were all poor in Western Oklahoma. There was only the hope of marrying, having children, and continuing the struggle with her nose pushed into the dirt.

This is their existence, the sum total of what they can expect, all that there is. But Flutie aspires to more. Her family doesn't and, in this regard, Glancy follows the novel I always think of as the first by a Native American author to gain serious literary attention among cognoscenti and literati—Winter in the Blood, by James Welch. Native Americans attempting to assimilate into America, eking out their livings at menial jobs, drinking heavily, passing day by day by boring day in the gigantic open spaces of places like Montana, Wyoming, Oklahoma. Essentially, there's nothing else toward which to look forward. Texas has magical connotations for Flutie, as if it were some profoundly exotic locale; but, when she makes her way to the border, it's just an unelaborate wooden sign bearing the name 'Texas', and the other side looks exactly like Oklahoma.

I think it's most profitable to take a glance at Glancy's novel by means of the three points I outlined above, though in a slightly different order:

Psychological Alienation | Flutie is utterly cut off from the world around her, existing almost as does a fish in a bowl; and, for reasons that aren't fully explained, she has trouble speaking, even choking out a sentence. A stranger emerges from a car, inquiring as to the whereabouts of a certain highway, and all she can manage to do is point. She can't find her voice in class when the teacher calls on her to give a report or do a math problem. "She tried to talk in front of the class, but there was no air. The teacher looked at her. The students stared. Their eyes were fish eyes." Although, sometimes, Flutie's inability to articulate resembles familiar troubles such as stage fright or fear of public oration, there's really no suggestion that it's a common speech dysfunction à la stuttering, Apraxia or Dysarthria; instead, it's a consequence of her loneliness. Our hearts, of course, go out to this intelligent, sensitive, feeling, pure little girl who's so traumatized by experience that she's rendered verbally paralytic; but, upon reflecting, there's a far deeper matter which knocks us flat on our backs: the author's incredible facility with language, her virtuosity with means of expression, exists incontrovertibly, in spectacular contrast to Flutie's incapacity to communicate; and, in this way, our sharing of Flutie's pain is made even more acute because we intuit all that she's lacking, missing. She seems crippled by everything—the landscape, her family, her frightening dreams of mysterious spirit women and deer. All of these things strike the reader as assaults upon her psyche, demons strangling the very speech from her throat. She's at total peace only when she collects rocks or builds a papier-mâché volcano for a school project. When she enters college, it's with the intention of studying geology, which, at least, means she's following her passion, one which has existed in her since childhood.

Family (and some friends) | In addition to Franklin and her parents, a few friends and neighbors also surround Flutie: the old brother and sister, Luther and Ruther Rutherford; her brother's two wives, Geneva and Swallow, respectively; a literalist minister; and Jess Tessman, a suitor whom everyone but Flutie has decided she should marry.

Her family is problematic and not particularly supportive. Franklin wants to do nothing but work on cars or attend auto shows, drink with his friends (a group of leather-clad motorcyle toughs), and pick up women (he actually runs around with his second wife before he marries his first; "Swallow was a girl every boy wanted, but Franklin got her with his car.") In typical circumstances, Franklin meets Geneva when called on to repair her car, and he has to repair her car because it was sideswiped by his own mother. Franklin and his father argue ceaselessly, occasionally to the point of physical confrontation. The father throws his toast at Franklin, Franklin hurls a plate at him. At age twenty, Franklin's still in high school, then he's arrested for stealing auto parts and is put away for two years. Flutie knows her brother's a thief; he and his friends steal the hood ornaments from cars, and Franklin's room is filled with these pilfered artifacts. At one point, Flutie confronts one of Franklin's pals, whom she knows is about to filch a car bibelot, and she meets with curses and insults. He sneers "What can you do?"—a question asked of her throughout the novel. (At another point, Flutie applies for a job in a store, where the owner asks her, "What can you do? Can you count?" The fact that she's being asked if she can count implies that she appears, to many people, to be slow or mentally disabled.) In an exceptionally uncomfortable moment, when Franklin returns from his hitch in prison, he makes violent love to his wife, upstairs, while the others, eating breakfast, can plainly hear the couple through the cheap walls. He doesn't learn. After he marries Swallow, she bales hay in the blazing sun while wearing a bikini, dozens of male workers milling about; in the end, fate deals him an excessively ironic blow.

The depth of feeling that Flutie has for her wayward brother is exceedingly strong, almost tearjerking:

Flutie's mother was upset that Franklin was restless in Stringtown. The last time Flutie drove her there, he cried in frustration. He hit the wire window between them in rage. The guards had taken Franklin back to his cell while his mother yelled at them.

Flutie felt queasy.

'Franklin', Fluite cried in her room. She wanted to be a deer for him. Put him on her back. Tell him to hold onto her antlers. Take him out of Stringtown. Out of Vini. Give him something to do. Give him hope.

We should note, in that passage, that the mother is shown in one of her habitual deportments—yelling. The word 'yell' is frequently associated with her and might even be her primary mode of pronouncement. In relation to Flutie, she often makes cruel or demeaning remarks, and it's abundantly clear that she loves Franklin more, or, at least, in a different way. But she's mostly a mystery. Glancy offers little in the way of psychological explanation or background, with respect to the mother, and, in this fashion, she remains sealed off from the reader in the same way that she gives the impression sealed off from the other characters. Her essence appears, to me, to be impenetrable.

This is, also, somewhat the case with the father; but at least, in his instance, we're supplied with some information. He keeps a sweat lodge in the backyard and, when his wife demands he get rid of it, he fights her vigorously, declaring it to be the only reminder of his people left to him. Fluite begs for affection, for simple fatherly attention, but he seems incapable of giving it. When she asks him to tell her a story, he refuses, or can't do it. His discourse with Franklin is always either harsh or condemning, or else they bypass talk to resort to physical violence. Communication between Flutie's parents, too, is limited to insults or biting comments about each other's worst traits. This family environment isn't, at all, conducive to positive growth.

Nature and the earth | Throughout the book, when Flutie tries to speak in uncomfortable situations, Glancy introduces water metaphors into the text, and Flutie is perpetually thinking about—or observing—situations of nature. A small sampling:

Her head felt full of water. If she tried to talk, the words moved like waves on an ocean.

(she heard) The wind and the water from the dried sea that had once covered the Great Plains.

There was a rock buried in the road. Sometimes, Flutie could see it after a wash out. But rain didn't come that often or hard in western Oklahoma. She liked knowing the rock was there. It was a barrier. A protector...In fact, she imagined that the rock held up all of Oklahoma from the aquifier that tried to climb above the land.

Her voice moved inside her like a boat.

The Salt Plains were the giant mouth where everything was swallowed. The sink where the ocean had drained with a sob in its chest.

Somewhere under the heavens, somewhere, something was happening. But she couldn't see it. The prairie was in her way. The whole world groaned in western Oklahoma. The emptiness sucked the sounds into itself. A child dying in Africa. A woman crying in Bangladesh. Franklin turning in his bed in Stringtown. A man without hope in Wales. Russians flatten a Chechan Village...

Virtually every page contains writing of this quality, allusions to the natural world that occur wholly within Flutie's mind (no other character is able to create this kind of interior poetry). The effect is almost as if her brain is the receiving station for the universe's antenna. Remarkable!

Flutie is a somber, deeply meditative novel, its layers continulessly peelable as those of the proverbial onion. It holds out cautious hope for its heroine and offers countless textures of possiblity to the reader, amounting to a reading experience that's hauntingly uneasy to forget.