Indian giver

A 465-page volume of short stories by a Native American author — it’s not, perhaps, the kind of thing everyone would automatically reach for, if they hadn’t already heard about it. Well, now you’ve heard about it, so you don’t have that excuse. Reach for it. Read it. Because the stories it contains (15 new, 16 old) are moving and hilarious, and they amount to an education.

Take the term Native American, for example. Isn’t this the accepted way to refer to the author’s ethnicity? You’d have thought. Yet Sherman Alexie avoids it, referring to himself and his characters as ‘Indian’. Everything he writes is imbued with a consciousness of the irreversible wrong visited on his ancestors, but this is as often wry as plaintive. The knock-on consequences include alcoholism, which isn’t funny, and a tendency to perform traditional songs and dances, which can be very silly indeed. Just occasionally, Alexie gets sentimental with his aboriginal schtick (see, for instance, the ending of the first story here, ‘Cry Cry Cry’), and then I was reminded of that scene in The Last of the Mohicans when a long-haired Daniel Day-Lewis murmured about the sun drawing forth from his mother’s breast the stars, etc etc, while a sultry Madeleine Stowe swooned, and the rest of us winced or tittered.

On the whole, though, this is exactly the kind of thing Alexie likes to poke fun at. In ‘This Is What It Means To Say Phoenix, Arizona’, one Indian meets another in a store and consoles him on the death of his father. How did you hear about it, the second man asks. To which the first replies: ‘I heard it from the birds. I felt it in the sunlight. Also, your mother was just in here crying.’