30 Jan 2013 00:39:36
The thing to forget straightaway, before approaching the work of Sherman Alexie, is anything you might have heard about him being an author who "just writes about Native Americans" that might have got you worrying about him being ominously narrow or specialist. Alexie grew up on an Indian reservation in Washington State and his short stories rage and pulsate with the centuries of injustice that have been visited on Indians – the word his characters prefer to use when referring to themselves – but they're really no more "Native American" stories than, say, Daniel Woodrell's are "hillbilly" novels. They're just his way in to write about life, death and growing up in a unique voice that's as mordantly witty as it is downtrodden. Blasphemy, which includes 16 new Alexie tales and some of his best from the past, is roughly where the sensitive testosterone swagger of Junot Diaz meets the arch, laconic eye of Lorrie Moore. Alexie writes crushingly about pungent rural minimum wage work and tribal acceptance, but no less affectingly about life in the city – particularly in "Gentrification", as funny and heartbreaking a story about the disposal of a mattress as you'll ever read, and "Night People", ostensibly about a sexually charged encounter between two insomniacs but arguably about the failing sex life of the male party, who marvels at "those strange and lucky people whose engines are not completely powered by various bodily fluids". If this is your first taste of redolent imagery such as "I live in my studio apartment with the ghosts of two dogs, Felix and Oscar, and a laptop computer stuffed with bad poems", you'll want to read more of him, which means you'll end up having to rebuy some of these stories. But that's OK. Many are easily good enough to own twice.
