War Dances (review)

It is often only at the end of a writer’s career that it becomes possible to see how a writer’s work has developed, how the focus has narrowed or expanded, how the writer’s thought process has shifted. In the sixteen years since Sherman Alexie won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Book of Fiction for the ground-breaking and controversial short story collection Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), he has published seventeen books, including poetry, novels, and short fiction. Thanks to this rapidly expanding catalog, we are able to witness Alexie’s development in almost real time.

From the very start, Alexie has explored the question of what it is to be “Indian” in contemporary America, both on and off the Spokane Reservation. Ten Little Indians (2003), however, began to shift away from the antagonistic cultural tribalism of earlier books. Ethnicity was no longer the controlling force in the lives of his characters. They were people first, Indians second. War Dances moves one step further, and for the first time Alexie has included two stories in which ethnicity is merely implied.

“The Ballad of Paul Nonetheless” chronicles the adulterous pursuits of the protagonist alongside the disintegration of his marriage. Unable to express himself except through the borrowed emotion of popular music, the feckless Paul is made mute before his wife. Alexie is a feminist and imbues his female characters with emotional strength, wit, and intelligence, regardless of their race. His male characters, however, are fickle and much less self-aware, led by the twin urges of aggression and sex. White men, particularly, are portrayed as inept, foolish, and, at times, malign. In Alexie’s world, Paul is undoubtedly white.

The title story is a mourning song for the narrator’s father and the narrator himself, an elegy for Sherman Alexie Sr. and Sherman Alexie the son. Struck by an inexplicable deafness in one ear, the narrator ponders his own mortality while grieving the loss of his father. The most obviously autobiographical of the collection, the story centers on Alexie’s childhood hydrocephalus and his father’s alcoholism and offers an intimate glimpse of the author’s personal fears and regrets. “I would always feel closest to the man who had most disappointed me,” the narrator says in a deeply moving tribute to a much-loved father (171).

There is, unfortunately, one major historical inaccuracy which upends Alexie’s frequent arguments about authenticity and the portrayal of Native American characters by non-Native writers. In the flash fiction piece, “Looking Glass,” Alexie places the Bear Paw Mountains, the setting for the Nez Perce’s 1877 surrender, in Idaho instead of neighboring Montana. Alexie would be quick to question the credibility of any white writer who made such a basic error. This aside, the stories and poems in this collection are emotionally complex, lyrical, irreverent, and experimental. At times, they are both achingly funny and heart-rending. With this book, Alexie makes one more step on his way from being a great Indian writer to simply being a great writer.