SHERMAN ALEXIE IS HEARTBREAKINGLY FUNNY

LAUGH UNTIL IT HURTS | November 29th 2007

Elliot P./Flickr

Ariel Ramchandani goes to hear Sherman Alexie read from his new book, a novel for young adults. She finds he has a clever way for bridging the yawning gap between his own experiences and his reader's ...

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People prefer their angst with a little acne, or at least in combination with childhood bewilderment. These generalised thoughts occurred to me at a reading by the author Sherman Alexie for his first young-adult novel, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian". As I waited for him to begin, I thought affectionately of my favourite young-adult heroes and heroines, navigating the halls of high school or something much worse. Precocious narrators, from Holden Caulfield to Anne Frank, have told compelling stories that elicit those ever-elusive qualities of sympathy and empathy from readers like myself.

So I was interested in what would happen when Alexie, an author of primarily adult works, read his first young adult novel to an almost all-adult, all-white audience on the fourth floor of Barnes & Noble in New York's Union Square. Alexie strode to the stage, rehearsed and ready to do battle, and performed a version of his life with clarity and pugnacity. To a crowd ridden with guilt about the treatment of American Indians in this country (as I think we should be), Alexie repeatedly shouted the words "white, white white", until it became more of a dare than a description. He was asking his audience to either take up or push away the nagging thought that this accusation might apply to us.

Of course, Alexie was also incredibly funny. With steely, self-effacing humour, he provided the sugar to help the medicine go down. And, as with a good comedian, it was hard to tell where the sugar ended and the medicine began. Alexie, both in person and in writing, embodies the term "heartbreakingly funny". But I wondered about how effective such antagonistic humour (and its soul-mate: uncomfortable silence) is at bridging the gap between the author's experience and the audience's. Does the point get across?

I was talking about this with a friend the other night, and she told me what I believe to be a very relevant story. In her middle-school history class (presumably the age group of Alexie's target reader), during the unit on the Holocaust, her teacher assigned the class the task of writing about their own "personal holocausts"--a time in their lives when they had faced great adversity. The friend in question, a very free-thinking 7th grader, refused to do the assignment on the grounds that nothing in her life so far was even a little bit as bad as the Holocaust.

Although the assignment was a noble one--a variation on the fine themes of connecting people through stories--I understand her reaction completely. I'd like to think Alexie does as well, or at least addresses the issue at hand. He gets that the distance between his experience and mine may not be crossable. He draws attention to it, shoves it in our faces, and performs it, jokes about it.

Yet this National Book Award winner is very successful at making people feel. Children and adults laugh, cry, and care deeply about Junior and his family. In a story of his called "Net Profit", published in the Stranger, a Seattle-based newspaper, he describes a fictional exchange about words with his late father. At the end of the conversation he admits: "Of course, my father wouldn't have said any of that. He was a fairly simple man. But I put the words in his mouth because I wanted to put the words on the page."

This phrase seems to explain well what he is doing "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian". Although he emphasises his characters' inability to express themselves, his choreographed, nearly lyric prose and thoughtfully probing narrator, Junior, lets him say things that never would have been said. That never could have been said. Things that only fictional children and thoughtful adults say.

This is why I didn't believe Alexie when he said dismissively at the reading that his work is not cathartic. This is also why I believe anyone could relate to him and his work. We read in part because we ache for what could have been said. We understand and respect Junior's urge to "talk to the world", and want "the world to pay attention" to him right back.