Hobomok, by Lydia Maria Child

When I added this book to my list, I was under the impression that it was a captivity narrative gone wrong -- a woman is kidnapped by a savage native and ends up assimilating into his culture. This is not what this book is. It's about 15 chapters of often tedious religious arguments among major and minor characters that drones on and on about how depressing and stressful frontier life was only to kill off the protagonist's fiance near the end of the book only to resurrect him from his ocean grave a few chapters later. The last five or six chapters are the most compelling of the entire book. After Mary finds out that Charles Brown has drowned on a ship in the East Indies, she goes into a state of delirium, marries a longtime family friend Hobomok, the whitest savage around, and, after months of coming to terms with what she did during her grief, actually starts to like Hobomok. We skip over their life together until their son is 2 years old. Hobomok goes out to hunt one day and comes upon none other than Charles Brown who lived, after all. Hobomok is so disgusted with himself for marrying Mary, Charles' woman, that Hobomok runs away to die among strangers, leaving Charles to unproblematically swoop in, marry Mary (Hobomok conveniently signed a divorce decree before he left), and raise little Hobomok Jr, who we learned has been named Charles Hobomok Conant all along. And that's exactly how it goes down: Charles pops the question the same night Mary finds out Hobomok has basically sacrificed himself for her, Mary's a little annoyed, but she says yes, they get married, and little Charles H. Conant Jr goes to Oxford to study when he grows up (seriously -- that's the last paragraph).

I feel disgusted. It's all so white-washed and openly racist.

On the bright side, there's lots of trauma, and as I said, the book does drone on and on about early American trauma. It's complicated, as the trauma of the story's 1600 setting comes to us via a male narrator who has read a much longer, much more tediously detailed manuscript and is now summarizing it for us. It was published in 1824 anonymously as by "An American" who everyone assumed to be male.

Interesting stuff about the difference between male grief, which is silenced and sequestered, and female grief, which is more or less derangement no matter how she plays it. The scene where Mary discovers Charles' death  and the scene where Mary's father finds out she didn't die, but that she instead married Hobomok, are awesome and memorable. I think LMC could have picked up at around chapter 15 and expanded from there. I'm not sure at this point why I needed the first 3/4 of the book except to establish Hobomok and Charles' positions next to the family, the interrelations of the townspeople, the fear with which people lived their daily lives and traveled, etc.