Alexie's ordinary Indians

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Did all those people in the World Trade Centre really die? Or did some just walk away from miserable lives and start again...

Ten Little Indians

By Sherman Alexie

Grove Press

244 pages, $39.95 (hc)

Sherman Alexie is far from ordinary. The Spokane/Coeur d'Alene writer has written two novels, three books of short fiction, six books of poetry and one screenplay (for the film Smoke Signals). He is also a stand-up comedian, and recently wrote and directed his first film. But despite his extraordinary range, Alexie prefers to write stories about "ordinary" Indians.

His newest book, Ten Little Indians, is a collection of nine stories that, for the most part, describe ordinary Aboriginal people in the Pacific Northwest who face the ordinary pressures of work, school, home, and relationships.

The ordinary man in "Flight Patterns" has a house, a wife, a kid, and a sales job that has him on the road a lot. The ordinary woman in "The Search Engine" is a scholarship student with good grades and a nice mom.

The problem with Alexie's "ordinary" Indians is that they are not so ordinary, at least not to a young person on a remote reserve or a single mother in Winnipeg. Alexie's ho-hum attitude toward these characters' privileged circumstances is on the one hand admirable. (As the student in "The Search Engine" says, it may help "white folks finally [understand] that Indians are just as relentlessly boring, selfish, and smelly as they are.") On the other hand, however, any author who deliberately writes about "relentlessly boring" characters should expect some readers to be less than enthralled by these people and their pampered lives on the middle-class side of the tracks.

Although these characters inhabit a privileged world, the life-changing events they experience and the insights they share convey universal lessons. When the young lawyer responds to a racist incident with violence (in "Lawyer's League"), it stands to restrict his future choices, which might be just what he wants. When the man in "Flight Patterns" gets a taxi ride from an Ethiopian refugee, he realizes there are many ways people can leave behind the ones they love. These are simple tales, but Alexie doesn't tell them simplistically. In fact, he takes chances that other writers do not.

In one story, for example, he says the unsayable (at least in America) about 9/11: Did all those people in the World Trade Centre really die? Or did some just walk away from miserable lives and start again somewhere else? (Since the character in "Can I Get a Witness?" is Spokane, Alexie could also be asking whether or not Aboriginal people understand better the transformative aspects of disaster.)

Alexie has a wry sense of humor, and he uses that humor to criticize both Native and non-Native society. Sometimes he uses a soft touch (as when he mentions "highly sacred and traditional Indian bars"), and sometimes he lectures ("Let me tell you a dirty secret: Quite a few of the state's most powerful Indian men and women are functionally illiterate. There are tribal councilmen who cannot spell the word 'sovereignty.'").

Alexie is a smart guy, and he exposes the hypocrisies and failings of pretty much everyone, from white liberals to homeless Indians.

The problem with Ten Little Indians is that the characters' inner voices all sound alike. A character in one story uses a noun as a verb ("suicided"), and so does a character in the very next story ("earthquaked"). The author has characters in two stories talk about "Mr. Grief." "Mr. Death" is mentioned in another. All the characters are ironically self-reflective, and they express themselves in remarkably similar ways. Their personalities are also the same: most of these Indians are left-leaning, anti-capitalists who read lots of books. In fact, Alexie often seems to be writing about himself. Like many of his characters, he was a scholarship student and basketball champ.

All writers use their characters to put forward their own deas, but Alexie is a lazy writer who changes only surface details (age, sex, job title) instead of creating complex characters that stand out from one another. (The one character who is different-a homeless man-still sounds like all the others.) He also never writes from the point of view of the councilman who can't spell "sovereignty," preferring instead to write from the point of view of educated characters like himself.