Eastlake returns to the Checkerboard Indian country of northwestern New Mexico, the setting of his brilliant so-called trilogy, for a final hangout with the Navajo as White America threatens to explode, flood, develop, sell or otherwise despoil the last of their land from under them. The whiplash dialogue, equally comic and gnomic, is amped up even further now, sometimes wobbling on the verge of self-parody, and the scenes of the author-character and his wife screwing on the floor of their ranch house didn’t do a lot for me. But these are minor quibbles set against (i) the excellence of Eastlake’s satire of this society that hunts eagles with helicopters and stripmines the desert to feed redundant power plants and (ii) his empathy with the Indians, such that there’s never a question of who’s the “other” here. ( )