In this broad and ambitious novel, Michael Dorris demonstrates his gift for crafting the distinct voices of characters in varied settings. His story traces the family history of figures from his stunning first novel, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, which was itself an intergenerational narrative woven from the stories of three Native American women--daughter, mother, and grandmother. Cloud Chamber begins in Ireland, crosses the Atlantic, and heads west from Kentucky to Montana to Washington State, following the generations. Intermarriage creates a diverse mix of family stories and individual identities. The myths about and courageous actions of ancestors emerge as the shaping forces of family legacy. Dorris is daring in the range of his narrative and successful in casting his characters' deep humanity.


From Publishers Weekly
Broadening his canvas and his historical sweep in this memorable and quietly moving novel, Dorris braids the voices and histories of selected members of five generations descended from a raven-haired hellion named Rose Mannion, who flees Ireland for Kentucky. Among her descendants is her great-great-granddaughter Rayona, a half-black and half-Indian girl readers will remember from A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. Dorris's evocative prose gathers strength and clarity as he moves to the second generation and into the rich vein of his multifaceted exploration of what it is to be part of a family. He captures the fierce Irish bitterness of two controlling women: Rose and her daughter-in-law, Bridie, who marries Rose's son Robert even though she's in love with Rose's favorite, Andy. Robert and Bridie's two daughters, Edna and Marcella, who witness their father's financial and physical ruination and must battle TB, which they contract from him, are lifelong safe havens for each other. Marcella falls in love with a black man, but she loses him after they marry, and her son, Elgin, is raised among the white community. A grown Elgin keeps his white family separated from his Indian wife and daughter (Rayona) until after the wife's death. Dorris brings the strands of his narrative together in a deft conclusion?a naming ceremony, in which Rayona takes Rose's name, and in which we see the youngest member tenderly managing three disparate generations and loving them all in her own intrepid way. Thus Dorris provides a moving and persuasive image of a reconciliation for which America still yearns. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Multitalented Dorris, justly praised for his recent short story collection, Working Men (LJ 9/1/93), and for his nonfiction The Broken Cord (LJ 7/89), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, returns to long fiction with a strong novel of family in America. In a time when our country's cultural diversity is often reduced to buzzwords, Dorris brings it to moving, sometimes startling life with the complex McGarrys, who relate their story in an absorbing variety of first-person narratives. From matriarch Rose Mannion, running scared and desperate from Ireland in the 1800s, to her mixed-race descendants in America today, the men and women in this tale speak with thoroughly convincing and utterly individual voices as they illuminate the passion, anger, and love linking them together. (One link reaches from Kentucky to Montana, where readers familiar with Dorris's A Yellow Raft In Blue Water will be pleased to reunite with vibrant young Rayona Taylor from that 1987 novel.) Altogether, this is a fine book whose literary excellence is matched by its accessibility to general readers and young adults. Highly recommended.-?Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, Va.Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Valerie Sayers
. . . composed of shards of memory: the ragged jumps in the characters' storytelling and the novel's refusal to tidy up their mysteries are evocative and powerful. . . .


The Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Pam Houston
Michael Dorris's novel, Cloud Chamber, confirms everything I suspected after reading A Yellow Raft in Blue Water: that he is one of the true masters of voice, of character and of storytelling in contemporary American literature. As comfortable in the voice of a consumptive teenage girl as he is in the voice of a black waiter in a German officers' club, as at home with the Irish landscape as he is with rural Kentucky and Montana's Great Plains, Dorris weaves five generations, at least that many ethnicities and three times that many locales into a cohesive and satisfying narrative--made all the more satisfying by its vastness and scope. In Cloud Chamber, Dorris tells the American story of hard people leading difficult lives with as much courage, insight and allowance for complexity as anyone writing today.


From Booklist
Dorris expands the family saga he began in A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987), his celebrated first novel that spanned 40 years and featured the first-person voices of three generations of strong-willed Indian women, including the mixed-race teenager Rayona. This time, readers will meet Rayona's father's family and hear the sounds of seven of their voices, beginning in nineteenth-century Ireland with black-haired Rose, a self-described "force to behold," and concluding 100 years later in modern Montana with Rayona's own coda-like voice that brings the saga full circle. An extremely ambitious novel that invokes elements of Greek tragedy, Cloud Chamber is far more than family history: it is a thoughtful exploration of family as history. "The dead never really are quite gone in our family," one of the characters observes. Their emotional choices--right and wrong--live after them, dramatically demonstrating that lives do matter "past their limit." The past, present, and future are all mixed together. And despite the fact that, as Rayona muses of her ancestors, "nobody ever seemed attracted to someone from the same group or of the same color," the end result is reconciliation and "our own personal ethnic rainbow coalition." Though not unflawed--a few voices sound confusingly similar and a few characters are more types than people--this is a compellingly readable and emotionally satisfying novel, full of secrets and surprises. Michael Cart


From Kirkus Reviews
Dorris's first solo novel in almost a decade is a partial prequel to his successful A Yellow Raft in Blue Water (1987), and a generational saga that celebrates the enduring power of family ties. It begins in western Ireland in the mid-19th century, with Rose Mannion's struggle to choose between the charismatic lover who has betrayed ``the Cause'' (of Irish independence) and the decent man her family and townspeople urge her to prefer. A half-century later, Rose's sons Andrew (a priest) and Robert are the two halves of a dilemma that frustrates Robert's dissatisfied wife Bridie (a terrific character: hard as nails, yet helplessly in thrall to the one man she cannot have). The story moves ahead with scarcely credible speed (a major flaw in Dorris's otherwise efficiently constructed narrative) to the 1930s when Robert, recovering from illness and amnesia, makes the reacquaintance of Bridie and their daughters Edna and Marcella, in the American Midwest, to which the family has been rather summarily transplanted. The novel finds its footing in a beautifully detailed and extended contrast between Edna's stoical common sense and Marcella's somewhat flighty romantic nature--expressed in the ailing Marcella's impulsive marriage to a handsome young black man she meets while recuperating in the sanitarium where Edna works as a nurse's aid. The focus then shifts to Marcella's son Elgin, his Army experiences in Germany in the 1960s (during which he learns some disturbing truths about his father's reported death in wartime), and thereafter to Elgin's daughter Rayona (a major character in Yellow Raft). Though it's all a teensy bit contrived and too hurried to be fully convincing, the tale is gripping, thanks to Dorris's empathy for the ethnic diversity and solidarity that give his characters their strength, and to a skillfully varied succession of voices, all quite distinctive. A little of John O'Hara, and rather more of A.J. Cronin, here, but the story's details will draw you in and keep you reading. (Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selection; author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
Ursula Hegi The range of Michael Dorris's vision has always been impressive. His fiction is imaginative and perceptive, filled with wisdom and sensitivity. Cloud Chamber is an absorbing and insightful novel about courage, love, perseverance and -- above all -- the complex choices we all make without realizing how they will affect future generations.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Moving from late-nineteenth-century Ireland to contemporary America, Dorris tells the extraordinary story of Rose Mannion and her descendants. Rose is, as she herself immodestly notes, "a force to behold," with a full head of the blackest hair - a legacy of a shipwrecked Spanish ancestor washed up on a Connemaran shore generations earlier - and an unstoppable will. Even her relocation to a small river town in western Kentucky cannot temper the fire of her nature. Over a period of more than one hundred years, Rose's legacy of love and betrayal, coupled with the intense internal struggles of family, is passed down from generation to generation. As one character notes tellingly, "The dead are never really quite gone. The influence of their deeds and personalities is always pushing us and nudging us one way or the other."

FROM THE CRITICS

Elizabeth Judd

Cloud Chamber attempts to cash in on the winning formula that Michael Dorris established in his bestselling A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. It's similar to the one that runs through the novels of his sometime writing partner, Louise Erdrich. Once again, Dorris tells the story of a mixed-race family via a succession of strong-willed, eccentric-but-supposedly-loveable first-person narrators. Leaving nothing to chance, Dorris even resurrects Rayona Taylor, the popular heroine of A Yellow Raft. Dorris' shameless reliance on formula is irritating, and I found myself vowing to resist the familiar charms of Cloud Chamber. By the halfway point, however, I'd succumbed; no new literary ground is broken here, but Cloud Chamber kept me turning the pages.

Dorris needs just five degrees of separation ￯﾿ﾽ in his case, five generations within one family ￯﾿ﾽ to carry us from Rose Mannion, a nineteenth-century Irish girl who flees to America after betraying her turncoat lover, to Rayona Taylor, a part-black teenager who was raised on an American Indian reservation and now works at Kentucky Fried Chicken. Dorris isn't coy about his central message: No matter how racially or temperamentally different family members may seem, they reflect and refract a shared history and character worth preserving. When Rayona is given a cut-glass vase of Galway crystal that once belonged to Rose Mannion, Rayona sees in it "a thousand faces, each different from the rest." Lest anyone miss the point, Dorris bombards the reader with this crystal vessel metaphor ￯﾿ﾽ invoking it on the first and last pages ￯﾿ﾽ to represent family heritage as fragile and multi-faceted.

Cloud Chamber doesn't venture into original territory until Dorris introduces Rayona's maiden great-aunt Edna McGarry. Edna is an unassuming supporting player who's istinguished by the depth of her insight and the intensity of her loyalty and love. Lacking the exotic history or flamboyant personality of the typical Dorris heroine, Edna is the prime mover that quietly keeps the family together. It is Edna who Rayona identifies with and who prompts Rayona to realize that "being a family is a voluntary duty. We're none of us here against our will." Although Edna is nobody's idea of an electrifying character, her appearance elevates otherwise tepid material into something far more nuanced and surprising. Ultimately, Dorris wins you over only when he deviates from his trusty formula. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly

Broadening his canvas and his historical sweep in this memorable and quietly moving novel, Dorris braids the voices and histories of selected members of five generations descended from a raven-haired hellion named Rose Mannion, who flees Ireland for Kentucky. Among her descendants is her great-great-granddaughter Rayona, a half-black and half-Indian girl readers will remember from A Yellow Raft in Blue Water. Dorris's evocative prose gathers strength and clarity as he moves to the second generation and into the rich vein of his multifaceted exploration of what it is to be part of a family. He captures the fierce Irish bitterness of two controlling women: Rose and her daughter-in-law, Bridie, who marries Rose's son Robert even though she's in love with Rose's favorite, Andy. Robert and Bridie's two daughters, Edna and Marcella, who witness their father's financial and physical ruination and must battle TB, which they contract from him, are lifelong safe havens for each other. Marcella falls in love with a black man, but she loses him after they marry, and her son, Elgin, is raised among the white community. A grown Elgin keeps his white family separated from his Indian wife and daughter (Rayona) until after the wife's death. Dorris brings the strands of his narrative together in a deft conclusion-a naming ceremony, in which Rayona takes Rose's name, and in which we see the youngest member tenderly managing three disparate generations and loving them all in her own intrepid way. Thus Dorris provides a moving and persuasive image of a reconciliation for which America still yearns. (Jan.)

Library Journal

Multitalented Dorris, justly praised for his recent short story collection, Working Men (LJ 9/1/93), and for his nonfiction The Broken Cord (LJ 7/89), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, returns to long fiction with a strong novel of family in America. In a time when our country's cultural diversity is often reduced to buzzwords, Dorris brings it to moving, sometimes startling life with the complex McGarrys, who relate their story in an absorbing variety of first-person narratives. From matriarch Rose Mannion, running scared and desperate from Ireland in the 1800s, to her mixed-race descendants in America today, the men and women in this tale speak with thoroughly convincing and utterly individual voices as they illuminate the passion, anger, and love linking them together. (One link reaches from Kentucky to Montana, where readers familiar with Dorris's A Yellow Raft In Blue Water will be pleased to reunite with vibrant young Rayona Taylor from that 1987 novel.) Altogether, this is a fine book whose literary excellence is matched by its accessibility to general readers and young adults. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/96.]-Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, Va.

Alice McDermott - The Washington Post

The book's distinction is its vivid, intelligent portrayal of our perpetual, universal and most inextinguishable longing for both transcendence and—here's the rub—communion in love.

Pam Houston - Los Angeles Times