SOURCE: "Vestiges of the West," in Times Literary Supplement, December 2, 1994, p. 22.

[Below, Ferraro applauds the characterization, narration, and attention to detail he observes in A Yellow Raft in Blue Water and Working Men.]

Michael Dorris's first novel, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1988), presents the interconnected stories of three women. It is divided into three sections, narrated in turn by Rayona (who would have been Raymond but is named instead after the label on her mother's rayon nightgown—"Didn't you ever hear of Ray for a girl?"), her mother, Christine, and her grandmother, the ruthless Aunt Ida. The action takes place in Seattle, on a Montana reservation and at a nearby National Park. This is a world of displacement and poverty; of hotel-rooms, mobile homes, bars, diners and the isolation of the reservation—the late twentieth-century vestiges of the American West.

The first section spans several months, beginning...