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South of Resurrection is Jonis Agee's 1997 literary novel, set on and around a fictional eastern-Nebraska Indian reservation and narrated by Moses Burden, a half-Sioux drifter returning home after a decade away when his stepbrother is murdered. The novel is Moses figuring out what happened, who in the family was involved, and what his return to Resurrection means for his own future.
Agee is in her patient regional-literary mode throughout. The Nebraska landscape (the Niobrara, the rolling sandhills, the long sight-lines of a Great Plains reservation) is rendered with real attention. Moses is a complicated, sometimes unpleasant narrator with the kind of moral seriousness that distinguishes Agee's other work (The River Wife, The Bones of Paradise). The murder plot is the structural spine, but the family material is where the novel lives.
Recommended for readers of Great Plains literary fiction (Kent Haruf's Plainsong, Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves), for fans of Indigenous-American literary fiction, and for readers looking for books like South of Resurrection in the small-town-prodigal-returns tradition. Four solid stars.
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