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

[rachelmanija]

Funny, sad, angry, uplifting, and impossible to put down, this novel about a geeky teenage boy who leaves his school on the poverty-stricken Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an academically superior-- but all-white and all-rich-- high school is, along with Kathleen Duey's Skin Hunger, one of my two favorite YA novels I've read all year.

Here's Arnold "Junior" Spirit on his first day at the new high school. Roger is another student:

"Hey, Chief," Roger said. "You want to hear a joke?"

"Sure," I said.

"Did you know that Indians are living proof that niggers fuck buffalo?"

I felt like Roger had kicked me in the face. That was the most racist thing I'd ever heard in my life.

Roger and his friends were laughing like crazy. I hated them. And I knew I had to do something big. I couldn't let them get away with that shit. I wasn't just defending myself. I was defending Indians, black people, and buffalo.

Arnold/Junior draws cartoons, which are an integral part of the book. They're actually drawn by artist Ellen Forney, and they're terrific.

I'm not sure if what I loved most about this novel was Arnold's very convincingly teenage voice and personality, the way that even the most minor characters had depth and complexity and a point of view, or the way that Alexie manages to depict the appalling conditions on the rez, the brutal social conditions that produced it, and Arnold's moments of self-pity without either glossing over any of that or producing an awesomely depressing book. Or the cartoons. Loved the cartoons.

The book this reminded me of the most was Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak, for its uncompromising grittiness, teenage protagonist who kept a sense of humor despite soul-crushing experiences (and found hope in art), and witty first-person narrative.

It also struck home to me on a personal level with its honest account of being stuck between two cultures, being a misfit, and the guilt and intoxicating freedom of walking away from one's childhood home, knowing that you've left others behind in terrible conditions that they are unlikely to be able to either improve or escape.

I'd read some of Alexie's short stories before (which I liked but which didn't really wow me), but none of his novels. Are any of his adult books anything like this? Which would you recommend?

Click here to buy it from Amazon: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Comments

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I've been a ridiculous Sherman fangirl since a Lenape friend handed me a copy of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight In Heaven, so I'd honestly recommend everything, especially his poetry. (Start with Summer of Black Widows and/or First Indian On The Moon there -- or check the tagged posts on my journal for some past poetryspam entries for a quick taste.)

But focusing strictly on his novels -- you've got two "adult" books, Reservation Blues and Indian Killer, and one other YA, Flight. They're all worth reading, although none of them quite hit the same balance of tone as Diary. Flight has the teenage protagonist, but is much much darker in the most part -- there's a rather Quantum Leap-ish feel as he shuttles between lives, each more traumatic than the last. It's not without humour -- even at his bleakest, Alexie can always find something to laugh about -- but it may be rather harder going, especially if you don't like reading about violence.

Of the two adult novels, Reservation Blues is his first novel-length work and it shows -- it's a bit sprawling and loose in places, though quite readable. The tone here is perhaps a bit closer to the lighter bits of Diary or Lone Ranger (although again, just as there's always humor in the dark bits, there's plenty of sorrow and rage under all the funny.) If you've read Lone Ranger, or the earlier poems, there are familiar characters here in new incarnations. Indian Killer, like Flight, is bleaker and more serious, although it's still got a great deal of ultraviolet humor to it. I think it's rather tighter structurally as a novel, but the ending is a little frustrating to some folks who go into it expecting it to read like a classic whodunit murder mystery and hate the ambiguity about what just happened.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I loved the Sasquatch poem.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

You're quite welcome, glad you enjoyed all the endless quotes! I adore Alexie to distraction and spam his stuff to friends at the drop of a hat to try to share the love. Reading his stuff for the first time was such an amazing experience, because if you're a book-loving Indian kid it can be so hard to find any reflection of yourself in the media; when I saw Smoke Signals for the second time with a Tsalagi friend, we must've spent at least a half-hour afterwards in friendly argument over which of us had been more like Thomas Builds-the-Fire as a child ("I had the same ugly Coke-bottle glasses!" "Oh yeah, well, my mom put me in the same horrible shirts!") -- because there's just that much of a shortage of Indian nerd characters...

And since I transcribed this ages ago in a review...here's one of my favorite passages from IK

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

<sub>On a gray day when John was six years old, Father Duncan took him to see the Chapel of the North American Martyrs in downtown Seattle. John found himself surrounded by vivid stained glass reproductions of Jesuits being martyred by Indians. Bright white Jesuits with bright white suns at their necks. A Jesuit, tied to a post, burning alive as Indians dance around him. Another pierced with dozens of arrows. A third, with his cassock torn from his body, crawling away from an especially evil-looking Indian. The fourth being drowned in a blue river. The fifth, sixth, and sevent being scalped. An eight and ninth praying together as a small church burns behind them. And more and more. John stared up at so much red glass.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" asked Father Duncan.

John did not understand. He was not sure if Father Duncan thought the artwork was beautiful, or if the murder of the Jesuits was beautiful. Or both.

"There's a myth, a story, that the blood of those Jesuits was used to stain the glass," said Duncan. "But who knows if it's true. We Jesuits love to tell stories."

"Why did the Indians kill them?"

"They wanted to kick the white people out of America. Since the priests were the leaders, they were the first to be killed."

John looked up at the stained glass Jesuits, then at the Spokane Indian Jesuit. "But you're a priest," said John.

"Yes, I am."

John did not have the vocabulary to express what he was feeling. But he understood there was something odd about the contrast between the slaughtered Jesuits and Father Duncan, and between the Indian Jesuit and the murderers.

"Did the white people leave?" asked John.

"Some of them did. But more came."

"It didn't work."

"No."

"Why didn't the Indians kill all of the white people?"

"They didn't have the heart for it."

"But didn't the white people kill most of the Indians?"

"Yes, they did."

John was confused. He stared up at the martyred Jesuits. Then he noticed the large crucifix hanging over the altar. A mortally wounded Jesus, blood pouring from his hands and feet, from the wound in his side. John saw the altar candles burning and followed the white smoke as it rose toward the ceiling of the chapel.

"Was Jesus an Indian?" asked John.

Duncan studied the crucifix, then looked down at John. "He wasn't an Indian," said the Jesuit, "but he should have been."

John seemed to accept that answer. He could see the pain in Jesus' wooden eyes. At six, he already knew that a wooden Jesus could weep. He'd seen it on television. Once every few years, a wooden Jesus wept and thousands of people made the pilgrimage to the place where the miracle happened. If miracles happened with such regularity when did they cease to be miracles? And simply become ordinary events, pedestrian proof of God? John knew that holy people sometimes bled from their hands and feet, just as Jesus had bled from his hands and feet when nailed to the cross. Such violence, such faith.

"Why did they do that to Jesus?" aked John.

"He died so that we may live forever."

"Forever?"

"Forever."

John looked up again at the windows filled with the dead and dying.

"Did those priests die like Jesus?" asked John.

Father Duncan did not reply. He knew that Jesus was killed because he was dangerous, because he wanted to change the world in a good way. He also knew that the Jesuits were killed because they were dangerous to the Indians who didn't want their world to change at all. Duncan knew those Jesuits thought they were changing the Indians in a good way.

"Did those priests die like Jesus?" John asked again.

Duncan was afraid to answer the question. As a Jesuit, he knew those priests were martyred just like Jesus. As a Spokane Indian, he knew those Jesuits deserved to die for their crimes against Indians.

"John," Duncan said after a long silence. "You see those windows? You see all of this? It's what is happening inside me right now."

John stared at Duncan, wondering if the Jesuit had a stained glass heart. Rain began to beat against the windows, creating an illusion of movement on the stained faces of the murderous Indians and martyred Jesuits, and on young John's face. And on Duncan's. The man and child stared up at the glass.</sub>

Re: And since I transcribed this ages ago in a review...here's one of my favorite passages from IK

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I love that.

[anachred.livejournal.com]

Haven't read anything else, so I can't weigh in, but it seems like he nailed what makes YA good in it's own way--a talent to cherish when transitioning from one to the other!

And it definitely gives people like me a picture of a life you hear about but can't really visualize...

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

This makes me want to read the book now. I read Cory Doctorow's Little Brother and did not quite feel that the protag was a teenager of a certain age (having two boys only one year removed from that age myself). Or maybe it was just a Mainland thing, that would feel more realistic in Mainland terms.

Anyway, I liked Laurie Anderson's Speak a lot, too. Skin Hunger I couldn't get into. I'll have to try it again another time, because I did think it was well written.

Have you read Saving Francesca, by Melina Marchetta? It's a YA novel, one of the best books dealing with depression I've ever read.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

No, but thanks for the rec!

[minnow1212.livejournal.com]

Heh--I just read that about a month ago, and then went out and bought a short story collection (more or less the same reaction as you) and then watched Smoke Signals, for which he did the screenplay--which I did like a great deal.

[hokelore.livejournal.com]

Indian Killer was good, I thought. I liked Reservation Blues; I like stories about bands trying to make it, and it has many funny bits, and also a lot of surrealism. I've also read Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fist Fight in Heaven. It felt kind of disjointed. It's more like a set of short stories around central characters, or feels that way to me.

[rilina.livejournal.com]

This is also one of my favorite books of 2008 to date: it managed to make me laugh out loud and weep. (Seriously, I giggled over the romance novel cover cartoon for a solid minute.)

[oyceter]

Yay Sherman Alexie! I love the cartoons so much, and I was caught among laughing and wincing and crying when I read it.

[brisingamen.livejournal.com]

I haven't read this Sherman Alexie (treat coming later), but I studied Sherman Alexie a couple of years ago, on one of my courses, and have been reading avidly ever since. His work can be variable, not quite what you thought it might be, but I have never been disappointed in anything of his that I've read.

[wildgreentide.livejournal.com]

That's definitely one of my favorite books so far this year. I also read Flight recently and really liked it. It's a very different story but I loved the way in which the protagonist (a teenage boy) confronts and learns from his own history. It was published as adult but it's really on the cusp of YA.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

I read this over vacation and am going to shove this at my 12-year-old nephew at the earliest possible opportunity. The basketball games! Dad's best friend and his motorcycle, which is so ancient all his white friends decide it's 'vintage!' The cartoons!! (I realized very quickly that the cartoons, unlike every similar book I've ever read, were vital.)

[spectralbovine.livejournal.com]

Loved it. Fabulous little book.