He sees himself and his family in every situation he deals with. There is the alcoholic father who goes out for a loaf of bread and a carton of milk but never returns, the beaten mother, the frightened children. He has been there. His fellow social workers tell him to get some distance or he will burn out on the job. But he doesn't.
None have any signs of positive resolution.
Finally, after one girl, for whom he has put forth special effort to save from destruction, dies a suicide, Levi does burn out. He had invested so much of his energy into trying to save the girl that he cannot continue in his social service work. Madchild Running is a first novel with many of a first novel's problems, but there is the keen edge of an observer with the understanding of an insider who is immersed in the milieu he writes about, which compensates for any shortcomings. Leslie Marmon Silko's irresolute Tayo of Ceremony , and Scott Momaday's silent Abel of House Made of Dawn weren't smooth, finished literary characters. Nevertheless, the two authors became the very center of twentieth-century American Indian literature.