Far From Brooklyn

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie

OK.  I liked this book a lot.  Novels are the best way to get a viewpoint into the way other people live, because they are impressionistic and in that real, true to human perceptions, unlike most nonfiction reportage, which is tied to “facts” and ultimately misses the overall reality because the job is to accurately deliver the details.

And I do think that this book offers a reasonably accurate portrait of what it is like to live on the Rez as the gifted and ambitious son of kind but alcoholic parents.

But I wish, wish, wish, wish, wish, wish, wish that someone had had the guts to keep Alexie honest – to save him from his tendency to cute up his story.  I nearly didn’t read this book at all thanks to the cartoonish strokes in the early pages – and no, I’m not talking about the crappy cartoons that illustrate the book.  I’m talking about the cartoonish description of the narrator, Junior, at the beginning of the book.  Junior is nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in the other, and therefore prone to headaches.  He has seizures.  He has a lisp.  He stutters.  His head is so large that bullies spin him around – like he was a planet.  Get it?

This is just lazy writing – shooting for sympathy by creating a comically, cartoonishly damaged character who will, of course, triumph in the end.

Later, at the funeral of Junior’s beloved grandmother, a dumbass white guy interrupts the ceremony with an absurd story about a powwow dance costume. Don’t ask.  It’s a painfully cartoonish story, told painfully cartoonishly, and ends with a painfully cartoonish billow of laughter amongst Junior’s family and the other mourners that rings about as true as a “HaHaHa” sounds like actual laughter.

All right – that said, I did like this book quite a lot.  I really did.  It’s aimed at younger readers and perhaps Alexie was just trying to lower the tone a bit for his audience.  But I can’t help but think that if he had raised the tone he might actually have written something as extraordinary as “Huck Finn” or “Catcher in the Rye,” rather than an Indian version of “The Diary of Adrian Mole.”

Photo credit: Skógafoss, Iceland, July 2014; Martin Falbisoner via Wikimedia Commons