There's Something in the Backyard by Richard Snodgrass

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine, Dust Jacket: Near Fine. 1989. Viking. 1st Edition.

As this quirky modern fable begins, George Binns, laid-back English professor in Flagstaff, Ariz., finds what seems to be a masked Hopi Indian performing rituals in his backyard. Is this silent figure a kachina , or ancestral spirit, as local Hopis believe? Is it an Indian impersonator of a spirit, or maybe a prankster? This enigma is only one of Binns's worries. His bitter wife, a transplanted New Yorker like himself, is a heavy drinker whom his cooing girlfriend keeps pressuring him to leave; and his best friend, who's involved with his wife, is dying of cancer. This debut novel is a haunting, seductive, original story that grips the heart and the imagination as it counterposes the rootlessness and alienation from nature of the white characters to the Indians' powerlessness in the prevailing American culture. Snodgrass interweaves his own sardonic, modernized retellings of Hopi legends into his tale of marital woe.