Leslie Marmon Silko. Gardens in the Dunes. New York. Simon & Schuster. 1999. 479 pages. $25. ISBN 0-684-8ii54-5

Poet, essayist, and novelist Leslie Marmon Silko continues to stretch wide the canvas of American Indian experience in her new novel Gardens in the Dunes. Silko sets the action on the latenineteenth-century frontier, as the U.S. expands; we see two Sand Lizard Indian orphans displaced from their homeland and separated from each other after a cavalry raid on their homestead. The story follows the two sisters' independent quests to rediscover Home.

As Indigo and Sister Salt set out on their different paths, they encounter a panoply of colorful, uprooted characters who seek a similar sense of belonging. Indigo stumbles into the lives of a protofeminist, Hattie, and her experimental botanist husband Edward (in a handy metaphor, he is cross-fertilizing orange with lemon to create a new, more robust hybrid fruit). Tucked under Hattie's wing, Indigo travels to England, Corsica, and Italy as well as the U.S. Southwest. Although Anglo and moneyed, Hattie does not quite fit in. At an earlier period in her life, for example, her feminist take on the gospels ruffled male-primed feathers, leading to a diagnosis of hysteria resulting from "the overstimulation of lectures." Hattie's exclusion from a male-governed intellectual world and Indigo's racial estrangement ("now a Sand Lizard girl was loose in the white people's world") make for a perfect, unspoken understanding between the two. Not surprisingly, Indigo takes to Hattie's proto-environmentalist Aunt Bronwyn, who wants to save forests from the "wide scars in the bellies of the hills" inflicted by capitalist developers. Bronwyn affirms Indigo's identity as an American and an Indian: "After all, she was an American -'Whatever an American is'."

Woven among Indigo's feminist rolemodeling are chapters that follow the older sibling, Sister Salt. Unlike Indigo, Sister Salt remains in the Southwest, eking out a living by washing laundry and servicing frontiersmen in Arizona. Although she does not traverse the great oceans, she too bonds with a spectrum of characters, including Candy, a mixed African-American/Indian ex-slave who plans to brew beer only until he can move to a more race-friendly place.

Not surprisingly, in this story Silko shifts out of the mythopoetic-heavy narrative voice heard in her earlier novels, trying her hand at classic nineteenth-century dramatic realism a la Henry James. Although such verisimilitude dampens the novel's pace, deflating those heavy sighs and grand emotions we might feel as we follow Indigo and Sister Salt in their struggle to survive, Silko succeeds on the whole. Not only does the technique provide the appropriate narrative container to give the feel for a time past, but it also speaks to Silko's agility with words and forms that mainstream readers might not associate with an Indian writer. She proves once again that Indian writers can give voice to their reality in a number of styles, not just the mythopoetic. Of course, Gardens isn't by-the-book classic realism. Silko infuses the story with many dream sequences and turns out consummately beautiful sentences: "Later a big moon, not quite full, flooded the dunes with silver blue light that made the big daturea blossoms flow as they perfumed the evening air."

Gardens in the Dunes does present refreshing new views of people who, at the social and racial margins, work from common ground to resist the racist, materialist elite that tries to displace and pathologize difference. Home for Silko is not about racial solidarity. It is about seeking out like-minded peoples who are open to new visions and to change, and who share a deep commitment to the earth and the human spirit.