Hope against hope

Seattleite Sherman Alexie's fiction flies in the face of despair

By JAMES WALLING

While it's true that some writers improve with the passage of time, bad writers rarely morph into good ones, regardless of how much experience they manage to log.

And yet that's exactly what happened to Seattle writer Sherman Alexie.

Alexie has long since established himself as one of the most celebrated Native American writers in the business with bestselling novels like The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) and Reservation Blues (1995), and also for his work on films like Smoke Signals (1998) and The Business of Fancydancing (2002).

Sales and acclaim don't always equate to lasting significance, however, and Alexie's early works exhibit a tendency toward triviality, sentimentality and cliche that left many readers feeling disappointed-even if few critics have dared to say so in print.

But somewhere along the line, Alexie abandoned postmodern pretension and began to pare his prose down to the clean, direct, singularly poignant style we find beginning with his recent collection of short stories, Ten Little Indians (2003), and with his latest contribution to the annals of young adult fiction.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - winner of The National Book Award for Young People's Literature for 2007 - is by all accounts highly autobiographical, despite the astonishingly sad and bizarre events chronicled in its pages.

Alexie's protagonist and narrator, a brain-damaged teen born to desperately poor parents on the Spokane Indian reservation at Wellpinit, Washington, is open and honest to a fault.

Junior, as he's called, speaks with humility and candor about his alcoholic father, clinically depressed sister, physically abusive (and abused) best friend, the "bone-crushing" poverty on the reservation, the violence, the racism, and the various methods of escapism that he and those around him employ in an attempt to try and cope with their bleak and tragic lives.

It sounds sad, and believe me it is, but in Alexie's expert hands such subject matter is also very, very funny.
For example, among the list of items grouped under the title, "THE UNOFFICIAL AND UNWRITTEN (but you better follow them or you're going to get beaten twice as hard) SPOKANE INDIAN RULES OF FISTICUFFS," are the following:

"1. IF SOMEBODY INSULTS YOU, THEN YOU HAVE TO FIGHT HIM.
2. IF YOU THINK SOMEBODY IS GOING TO INSULT YOU, THEN YOU HAVE TO FIGHT HIM.
3. IF YOU THINK SOMEBODY IS THINKING ABOUT INSULTING YOU, THEN YOU HAVE TO FIGHT HIM."
And moving on to number five,
5. YOU SHOULD NEVER FIGHT A GIRL, UNLESS SHE INSULTS YOU, YOUR FAMILY, OR YOUR FRIENDS, THEN YOU HAVE TO FIGHT HER."
And finally,
11. IN ANY FIGHT, THE LOSER IS THE FIRST ONE WHO CRIES."

Junior endures his share of fisticuffs, and he is generally the loser. He mitigates his misery as best he can by drawing cartoons. He compulsively sketches the characters he comes into contact with, interweaving aspects of reality with flights of imagination. Ellen Forney (Seattle cartoonist) lends her considerable talents to the venture with hilarious and heart-rending sketches, attributed to Junior.

One early sketch features a drawing of Junior's parents as he imagines they might have turned out if "somebody had paid attention to their dreams."

His father, a depressive and undependable drunk, is featured in Junior's imagination smartly dressed, bearing the label, "The Fifth-Best Jazz Sax Player West of the Mississippi." His mother, beaten down by a life with little or no prospects, is imagined as, "Spokane Falls Community College Teacher of the Year 1992-98."
The disparity between what might have been and what is fact is a central theme in this arresting and memorable book. But the essentially tragic circumstances in Junior's world are tempered by a persistent and overarching hopefulness.

Hope-a concept as foreign to Junior as financial stability-is introduced early on by a concerned teacher:

"Where is hope?' I asked, 'Who has hope?"

"Son," Mr. P said. "You're going to find more and more hope the farther and farther you walk away from this sad, sad, sad reservation."

The rest of the novel concerns the germination and cultivation of hope in Junior's life-often in the face of tremendous personal tragedy-and his various attempts to retain a bridge to his life on the reservation even as he strives to escape its hardships.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian isn't just good "young adult" fiction, it's good fiction, period.
And with Alexie, good fiction has finally become the norm.

If you had asked me ten years ago whether the author in question would eventually bring tears of laughter and sorrow to the eyes of an insular cynic like me, I'd have scoffed.

But then it just goes to show-there's always hope.