NONFICTION - May 3, 1992

THE BROKEN CIRCLE by Rodney Barker (Simon & Schuster); 351 pp; $23). This is a grotesque story of a triple murder, perpetrated for no other reason than that a generation of white youngsters had been raised to believe that a Native American life was simply less valuable than their own. Two high school boys from Farmington, N. M., a small town adjacent to Navajo land, went looking for trouble one meaningless night, looking for “Injuns” to roll--and they found, to the community’s never-ending sorrow, three men who were drunk enough not to sense that there was something wrong about white boys offering them a ride. They were discovered in three different locations, all having endured similar torture and sexual mutilation, all left to rot with an indifference that was as unnerving, in its way, as the murders themselves. No matter how much the law-enforcement community wanted to believe that this was a case of Indians killing Indians, at least one officer knew that such an act required ritual, even respect. When the crimes turned out to be the handiwork of a couple of kids, with a third accomplice on one of the murders, decades of Native American hostility, and white defensiveness, exploded--particularly since the juveniles faced only two years in a detention facility for crimes that could have brought them life in prison had they been tried as adults. Barker has done a riveting job of tying the true-crime aspect of his tale to the larger issue of the community’s response to it--and if his prose does not quite match the grace of a Capote or a Tommy Thompson, the intensity of his storytelling style more than compensates. The reader’s instinct is to somehow reach through the pages and throttle the boys who committed the crimes, as well as the town fathers and parents who allowed such a malignant attitude about other human beings to flourish.