Conversations with Sherman Alexie edited by Nancy J. Peterson (review)

Outspoken, popular, prolific, and incisive, Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene) continues to garner attention as an indigenous writer of and for a contemporary moment. Conversations with Sherman Alexie (2009) offers new possibilities for assessing his rich body of work and the impact of his larger-than-life persona in various literary markets. Published as part of the Literary Conversations Series through the University Press of Mississippi, Conversations with Sherman Alexie reproduces twenty-one interviews in full and provides a detailed chronology for Alexie's increasingly high-profile career, including the 2007 National Book Award for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. By featuring interviews with poets, indigenous literature scholars, reviewers for literary magazines, and bloggers on young adult literature, Conversations highlights Alexie's success with diverse audiences as well as the persistent challenges facing indigenous writers, such as questions about what editor Nancy J. Peterson elsewhere terms "the nativeness of Native American literature."¹ By limiting editorial commentary to the succinct introduction, Peterson succeeds in allowing readers "to locate themes and issues that have remained at the forefront of Alexie's work, while also noting the ways in which his thinking on other topics has changed over the years" (xvii).

Conversations provides telling insights into Alexie's interconnected roles of writer, entertainer, and public intellectual. He rejects traditions of silence or stereotype in order to write about "the kind of Indian that I am: kind of mixed up, kind of odd, not traditional. I'm a rez kid who's gone urban, and that's what I write about. I've never pretended to be otherwise" (58). Alternately irreverent, somber, and passionate, Alexie is quick to riff on either criticism or praise and frequently courts controversy. Thus he declares not only that "the reservation system was created to disappear and murder Indians" (189) but also that, like the protagonist of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, he found success only by leaving the reservation: "Politically, I want all those folks, Indian and not, who celebrate me to realize that they are also celebrating the fact that I left the rez. All of my books and movies exist because I left" (189).

Some critics have charged Alexie with hyperbolically negative portrayals of reservation life, or what David Treuer decries as the damaging cultural shorthand of "Indian tears."² In response, Alexie defends the role of artist as "cultural investigator" rather than "cultural cheerleader" (122) and dismisses exploitative literature that resembles "a traveling road show of Indian spirituality" (50). Importantly, Alexie emphasizes the diversity of indigenous writers and texts: "Louise Erdrich's Indians are vastly different than my Indians" (190). In turn, he acknowledges key connections across various literary traditions: "William Faulkner's white folks and my Indians are more alike than one would suspect," and "I also see my reservation in the work of Flannery O'Connor" (190).

Alexie also declares a recalibrated sense of tribal identity for a globalized and post-9/11 world, noting that he is "increasingly suspicious of the word 'tradition,' whether in political or literary terms" (117) and that "you can belong to many tribes at the same time" (162). Along with his trademark humor and sustained attention to the effects of colonial violence, such a focus on "multi-tribal identity" (190) remains at the heart of Alexie's writing: "My strongest tribes are book nerds and basketball players, and those tribes are as racially, culturally, economically, and spiritually diverse" (190).

Due to the timing of publication, Conversations does not include Alexie's commentary on digital publishing or his memorable testimony in the 2008 trial related to the nba SuperSonics. Yet as his embrace of "books nerds and basketball players" suggests, Alexie's dual role as public culture critic and bookish "superfan" testifies not only to his remarkable media presence but also to his long-standing interest in refashioning modern masculinity. In a similar vein, Alexie calls for...