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...