Indian Killer
By Sherman Alexie
Atlantic Monthly Press, 420 pages, $22
Over the course of writing several novels, Sherman Alexie has evolved a style that might be called modern Indian magical realism: a melange that combines grindingly realistic portrayals of reservation life today with swift and deft satirical sketches of the rest of modern American society, connected by natural and supernatural events and interpenetrated with episodes from the one-sided, 19th Century struggle between embattled Indian tribes and the encroaching white people. At his best, Alexie can integrate all these disparate ingredients into some fascinating, and fantastic, conceit.
Suppose, for instance, that Spokane Indians got hold of musician Robert Johnson’s guitar, a magical instrument that would both play itself and tell the Indians what to do. Such is the premise for “Reservation Blues,” Alexie’s previous novel. At the beginning, “Indian Killer,” his current work, looks as if it will be more staidly and steadily realistic.
John Smith is born to a 14-year-old Indian mother and adopted at birth by a white couple in Seattle, Olivia and Daniel Smith. While raising John in a wholly white world, his adoptive parents also take pains to educate him in a general Indian heritage, though neither he nor they know what tribe he belongs to by blood. A couple of chapters present his very detailed imaginings of the reservation childhood his adoptive parents stole (as he comes to feel) from him. At prep school, he’s isolated by hostile and benign prejudice, though on the surface he’s “a nice trophy for St. Francis, a successfully integrated Indian boy.” As an adult, he declines to attend college and becomes a high-rise construction worker because, “He figured it was the Indian thing to do.” Brown on the outside, John is a mystery on the inside, even to himself. “When asked by white people, he said he was Sioux, because that was what they wanted him to be. When asked by Indian people, he said he was Navajo, because that was what he wanted to be.”
Cut off from Indian and white communities, John drifts further into a confusion that seems to take on elements of clinical psychosis (he refuses medication that would stop him from hearing voices) and that Alexie sometimes describes with an inspired simplicity, which is the strongest of his several styles. ” `Father,’ said John, his voice rising, his hands gesturing wildly. `All the anger in the world has come to my house. It’s there in my closet. In my refrigerator. In the water. In the sheets. It’s in my clothes. . . . It’s in my hair. I can feel it between my teeth. Can you taste it? I hear it all the time. All the time the anger is talking to me. It’s the devil. I’m the devil. If I could I’d crawl into a hole if I knew God was in there. Where’s the hole? You know, I just killed two white boys on the bridge. They were there on the bridge. They wanted to hurt me. They were the devil. I killed them. . . . They can’t hurt me anymore. They hurt me. They wanted to steal my eyes. They wanted everything. . . .”
A couple of other figures in the novel are given the same thorough characterization as John, notably Marie Polatkin, an Indian college student and activist who’s especially infuriated by white misappropriation of Indian culture: the white writers who recount “Indian legends”; phalanxes of New Age flakes with their dream catchers and medicine bags; her white professor, Clarence Mather, who’s teaching a Native American literature course with a reading list by white authors pretending to be Indian. Most of the people in the book, however, are not characters but caricatures: Mather, John’s adoptive parents, local radio host Truck Schultz. Some figures, such as Jack Wilson, a wannabe-Indian novelist particularly loathed by Marie, begin as fully realized characters but deteriorate into caricatures later. The caricatures are skillfully rendered and deployed in witty satirical set pieces, but because they are also the mouthpieces for the sort of ideology that the novel seems to oppose, one is uncomfortably reminded that paper tigers are easy to slay.
Meanwhile, the eponymous Indian Killer (who may be John Smith or Marie Polatkin or even Jack Wilson) is killing white people around Seattle and marking the corpses with blood-stained owl feathers. Although the thriller plot line is too perfunctory to be interesting, the brief sections from the unknown killer’s point of view exercise an eerie fascination. The real question has less to do with whodunit than with why, and the novel presents it as justifiable that Indians should kill white people simply because they belong to the group that has perpetuated so many atrocities against Indians. To bolster this case, Alexie’s techniques of interpenetration allow for brief reprises of such events as the Sand Creek Massacre and the assassination of Crazy Horse. But what adds insult to injury is white theft of Indian culture, which infuriates John and Marie (and perhaps their author) more than anything. The motif of stolen eyes eventually works itself out in an unpleasantly visceral way.
The justification of the Indian Killer makes the same kind of rhetorical sense as the violence often alluded to by Malcolm X or the rapes of white women recounted by Eldridge Cleaver in “Soul on Ice.” Some of the other propositions voiced are less logically constituted. “ONLY INDIANS SHOULD TELL INDIAN STORIES,” proclaims a sign hoisted by Marie and others to protest a reading by Jack Wilson. Sounds reasonable (especially after 30 years of Tonto), but if it’s true in principle, what right does Sherman Alexie–a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian–have to portray white characters, or to write from within the black musician Robert Johnson as he does (quite convincingly) in “Reservation Blues”?
This story is not told as well as it might be. It often reads more like an author’s notebook than a finished novel: sketches for characters, sketches for plot. There is a strange randomness to everyone’s behavior; relationships between characters are suggested, then abandoned; plot movements are implausibly twisted or simply dropped. Alexie’s hybrid style depends on an arbitrary manipulation that works wonderfully sometimes but often does not work at all.
Reading “Indian Killer” is rather like listening to someone so strangled with anger that he has become half incoherent. The lesson this book teaches is that the rage engendered in a people by a couple of centuries of oppression, mistreatment and betrayal cannot be blithely smoothed away by good intentions–and that is a lesson worth learning. It’s also worth remembering that anger is a force, like fire or flood, which, if left unharnessed, can only destroy.
