People Worth Remembering Michael Dorris’ ‘Cloud Chamber’ Is Full Of Rich Characterizations

“Cloud Chamber” by Michael Dorris (Scribner, 316 page, $24)

Michael Dorris’ new novel, “Cloud Chamber,” begins with a black-haired Irish lass’s betrayal of her lover in County Mayo and ends half a world away on a Montana Indian reservation. There, teen-age Rayona - part black, part white, part Native American - is preparing to take as her ceremonial name that of her great-great grandmother Rose, the self-same girl we met at book’s beginning.

“Cloud Chamber” is Rose’s story and Rayona’s, but it’s also that of the generations in between and what they know and don’t know about one another. As he did in his previous novel, 1987’s “A Yellow Raft on Blue Water,” Dorris deftly employs a chorus of first-person voices to spin a perceptive story of personal and family identity.

So it is that we get to know some remarkable people. There is Rose’s son, Robert, for whom amnesia is a way to deal with the disillusion and disappointment dealt him by his mother and his wife. There are his daughters, Edna and Marcella, both of whom suffer from tuberculosis; one loses her youth in a Kentucky sanitarium while the other finds the love of her life. And there is Elgin, whose black heritage is ignored until he joins the Army, where his lesson in family history sends him far away to Seattle and to Christine, “more heart-wasted than I am.” Rayona is their child.

Readers of “A Yellow Raft” will remember Christine and Rayona from that book. Dorris also has reworked two short stories, “The Dark Snake” and “Decoration Day,” from his 1993 collection Working Men into chapters of “Cloud Chamber,” This tells me that Dorris has been thinking about and living with his characters for a long time, pondering their family history, puzzling out the links between them - an old song, a cut-glass vase, bitterness, jealousy, resentment, love.

It’s no surprise then that many of Dorris’ characters take on a life of their own, seeming to exist outside these pages. For sure, we’d recognize Rose if we met her, the black hair that turned to gold when she was an old woman in the wake of a tragedy. But Edna and Marcella also make indelible impressions, both as young women on a fateful vacation on Lake Superior and as old women on a pilgrimage to Ireland.

One of the novel’s funniest and sweetest moments occurs near story’s end when the two elderly sisters pitch in to help Rayona at a Kentucky Fried Chicken after the cook has a nervous breakdown. Knowing Edna’s past and heart as we do, we’re not taken aback when she announces that the Colonel’s secret ingredient is “plenty of paprika.”

Dorris’ fluid writing etches other scenes: a proud, willful Rose bathing in water strewn with petals as she prepares to meet her lover; an ailing Robert getting his revenge on his deaf mother by swearing at her while she converses with a cousin; Marcella adjusting to the routine at the Waverly Hills sanitarium, “like some kind of vanilla milkshake: unnaturally white people, white staff uniforms, white walls, snow on the landscape.”

These are family stories worth remembering, a legacy that Rayona is beginning to appreciate by book’s end. “Nobody’s normal,” she remarks to Edna, who replies, “Thank the good Lord.”