Another short story collection
Sep. 25th, 2011 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileThis week I read Sherman Alexie's The Toughest Indian in the World, a short story collection. Several of the stories I read two years ago for Betsy's Ethnic America course. Alexie is most well-known as a YA author, but this collection seems to be adult literary fiction, judging by the number of middle-aged characters having deep thoughts about cheating on their spouses and peeing. (No, I will never stop making fun of "literary fiction" as a genre.)
Dear John Wayne may be my favorite story of the bunch, just because the anthropologist is so astoundingly incompetent and the old lady is so awesome at messing with him. However, all the stories are very good. Alexie's style is a bit difficult to pin down, with equal parts anger, humor, domestic cuteness, and sadness, with a hefty sprinkling of poeticisms on top ("At that moment, if you had broken open my heart you could have looked inside and seen the thin white skeletons of one thousand salmon"). Most of the stories explore what it means to "be Indian," from the various points of view of half-blood Indians, full-blood Indians, Indians married to white people, white people married to Indians, Indians married to other Indians, urban Indiand, reservation Indians, etc. On the one hand: identity is hard to pin down. On the other hand: identity is very, very real. My one criticism of Alexie: despite this variety of voices on what it means to be Indian, Alexie is often happy to take on the role of Spokesindian for All Indians Everywhere, which seemed a bit odd to me.
White liberals still stuck in stage 1 white liberal guilt should figure out how to put a check on it before reading this book, because Alexie offers approximately no advice at all on how to properly be such a good white person at Indians that you will single-handedly cause them to never even notice that you are white and they aren't, and if you start self-flagellating then Alexie is going to run you in circles forever.
Some of these stories are written in a very high poetical style, most notably Sin Eaters, in which the US government rounds up Indians for some sort of medical experiment; the POV character blacks out at the point in the story where someone is supposedly saying what the experimentation is for in anything like a straightforward prose way, but there seems to be some sort of plague going on and the doctors think the cure has something to do with Indian bone marrow. The story has a lot of dreams and a lot of hitting people with rifle butts and a lot of metaphorical talk about whales (the POV character's name is Jonah). Some of the other stories are written in a much more slice-of-life dusty-realistic style with lots of brand names in which the characters spend about half the page time having deep thoughts on Indian identity and the rest of it being ordinary, if not positively mundane, Americans. They take care of their aging parents and have existential crises and are bored with their jobs and are judgey at people and have the aforemocked deep thoughts about cheating on their spouses, and it is a testament to Alexie's skill as a writer (and particularly his sense of humor) that it is not boring as hell.
I like Alexie a lot but I think I managed to avoid actually doing any academic writing on him during Betsy's class and I don't feel like doing any serious literary critcism on him now, so I won't. I enjoyed the book; at some point I will get around to reading his others.
Dear John Wayne may be my favorite story of the bunch, just because the anthropologist is so astoundingly incompetent and the old lady is so awesome at messing with him. However, all the stories are very good. Alexie's style is a bit difficult to pin down, with equal parts anger, humor, domestic cuteness, and sadness, with a hefty sprinkling of poeticisms on top ("At that moment, if you had broken open my heart you could have looked inside and seen the thin white skeletons of one thousand salmon"). Most of the stories explore what it means to "be Indian," from the various points of view of half-blood Indians, full-blood Indians, Indians married to white people, white people married to Indians, Indians married to other Indians, urban Indiand, reservation Indians, etc. On the one hand: identity is hard to pin down. On the other hand: identity is very, very real. My one criticism of Alexie: despite this variety of voices on what it means to be Indian, Alexie is often happy to take on the role of Spokesindian for All Indians Everywhere, which seemed a bit odd to me.
White liberals still stuck in stage 1 white liberal guilt should figure out how to put a check on it before reading this book, because Alexie offers approximately no advice at all on how to properly be such a good white person at Indians that you will single-handedly cause them to never even notice that you are white and they aren't, and if you start self-flagellating then Alexie is going to run you in circles forever.
Some of these stories are written in a very high poetical style, most notably Sin Eaters, in which the US government rounds up Indians for some sort of medical experiment; the POV character blacks out at the point in the story where someone is supposedly saying what the experimentation is for in anything like a straightforward prose way, but there seems to be some sort of plague going on and the doctors think the cure has something to do with Indian bone marrow. The story has a lot of dreams and a lot of hitting people with rifle butts and a lot of metaphorical talk about whales (the POV character's name is Jonah). Some of the other stories are written in a much more slice-of-life dusty-realistic style with lots of brand names in which the characters spend about half the page time having deep thoughts on Indian identity and the rest of it being ordinary, if not positively mundane, Americans. They take care of their aging parents and have existential crises and are bored with their jobs and are judgey at people and have the aforemocked deep thoughts about cheating on their spouses, and it is a testament to Alexie's skill as a writer (and particularly his sense of humor) that it is not boring as hell.
I like Alexie a lot but I think I managed to avoid actually doing any academic writing on him during Betsy's class and I don't feel like doing any serious literary critcism on him now, so I won't. I enjoyed the book; at some point I will get around to reading his others.