Ghost Dancing by Anna Linzer. Picador, U.S.A.: 180 pages.

"Grandma One Rock had never once seen the salt water, but the memory lived in her bones; the tide still pulled at the blood beating in her veins."

Like Grandma One Rock, the characters of Anna Linzer's novel, "Ghost Dancing," pulse with the tides, the movement of the seasons. Jimmy One Rock, the central character, divides his time between Oklahoma, with Lenape family and neighbors, and Washington, with his wife and her tribe, the Salish. Jimmy ponders this dual nature, and the urges that pull him from one place to another, from community to loneliness and back.

Jimmy and his brothers, Roy and Chuckie, their lives sometimes blurred or interrupted by alcohol, have grown away from wise Grandma One Rock--with her stories "like mother's milk." It is this nourishment the brothers, sometimes blunderingly, seek for themselves--the way the seedling hears the sun, the men are still open to the commanding voices of the long-dead which ask them to mend the ties of their lives: build a sweat lodge, care more carefully for crops, respectfully bury Grandma One Rock's rotting car.

As if they symbolize the soul's movement, the feel of migration, cars appear in almost every chapter as familiars--vehicles for spirituality and insight, escape, independence, or objects associated with elders. Once, Chuckie (after a few drinks), believes "the green blinker light on the dash" is a bad spirit that his grandmother warned him about, and he tries to escape through the dome light. Jimmy, Chuckie, and Roy awaken one morning in their upside-down car in the middle of a field of squash with no tire tracks anywhere around them, as if they've been tumbled by unseen hands into their nourishing roots. And it is easy to accept this supernatural event in a novel where every material thing has significance: rocks, roads, rainstorms, dreams, voices, and even cars.

Like the squash that grows in the field by Grandma One Rock's cabin, the souls of the characters emerge from their seeds and work to push the ground, growing. They grow close, attached as if by lifeline to their tribes, but amble like vines, reproducing, returning to seed, pulled by the tension between family and close community and the need to move. Jimmy's wife, Mary, is called Mallard, "the one who leaves but always comes back."

The only uncomfortable parts of the novel are when the author steps from writing fiction into clichéd didacticism. For example, one character awkwardly philosophizes: "But maybe they just left our chapter out of the history books in those big, fine universities they go to." At the same time, Linzer is at her best in the chapter titled "Indian Education," in which Jimmy's wife Mary tells him the story of being the only Native American student of a narrow-minded schoolteacher. Here, Linzer illustrates cultural pain through art and careful detail, rather than putting awkward dialogue in the characters' mouths. Lecture is the exception, not the rule, in Linzer's careful and loving writing that seeks to explore the deep ambiguity of modern Indian culture.

Linzer opens a world unfamiliar to many readers--that of a group whose kinship bonds transcend time, age, and death. In "Ghost Dancing," the ghost dance is not so much a movement or a ritual or a protest, but a constant communication with and commitment to ancestal past.

    Wendy L. Smith teaches English at San Diego Mesa College.