In His Own Literary World, a Native Son Without Borders

By Eric Konigsberg

SEATTLE — The author Sherman Alexie doesn’t believe there is such a thing as selling out. He has no qualms about his commercial breakthrough’s coming when he wrote a young-adult novel, “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” despite the fact that he had already published 18 volumes of fiction and poetry to considerably less fanfare.

And he characterized the high-six-figure advance he is being paid for a subsequent novel, a thriller that is still at least a year away, as lucrative enough that it constituted “a pornographic deal.” He was quick to note that he meant nothing bad by that.

“No, I like porn,” he said.

Still, even Mr. Alexie has to draw the line somewhere. He turned down offers to sell the movie rights to “Diary,” a book he calls an extremely faithful recounting of his experience growing up poor on the Spokane tribal reservation in eastern Washington State.

“My concern was that they would never have been able to find an Indian kid who could act well enough and who was a good enough basketball player to play me,” Mr. Alexie said in a recent interview, adding that basketball was even more important to him than “the Indianness of me.” As it did during his own youth, salvation for his misfit protagonist, Junior, comes when he quits the reservation and excels on an all-white high school team. “I’d rather see myself played by a Puerto Rican or an Italian with a tan than have them ruin the basketballness of me,” he explained.

Mr. Alexie, 43, has followed the blockbuster success of “Diary,” the 2007 National Book Award winner for young people’s fiction, with “War Dances,” a volume of short stories and poetry published this month by Grove Press.

“I’m not conflicted about the success of that book,” Mr. Alexie said of “Diary,” “but I guess the thing is, you end up feeling very schizophrenic about it. I think the new book was an attempt to re-establish my eccentric self: ‘I’m not supposed to sell as many copies as I just did, so let me write something that won’t.’ ”

More significantly to him, Mr. Alexie said, is that in “War Dances” he has given readers a few characters of indeterminate ethnicity for the first time. “It’s not that they’re not Indians — they might be, they might not be,” he explained. “Up until now, I’ve always written identifiably Indian stories. I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there.”

The lesson of both the young-adult book and in a sense the new book, Mr. Alexie said, “is ‘Get off the rez. Be nomadic.’ ”

“We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans,” he continued, “but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization. You’d never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.” Mr. Alexie said he had been criticized for depicting reservation life as full of misery — “which it is,” he added.

He likes to talk about his writing as a responsibility and admits that it can, at times, feel like a burden. He recalled that in 1992, when The New York Times Book Review assessed the state of American Indian literature and declared his debut, “The Business of Fancydancing,” “one of the major lyric voices of our times,” he promptly went into the bathroom and vomited.

Mr. Alexie lives in Seattle with his wife, Diane, and their two sons, who are 8 and 12, and works out of an apartment he uses as an office in a luxury condo building.

“I’ll write whatever’s going well for a few months at a time and move around from poetry to stories to the novel to a movie script,” he said. “I’ll write 150 pages in three or four days, and maybe I’ll scrap it all because it’s terrible, or it’ll become four lines of a poem.”

The broad portfolio is another thing Mr. Alexie sees as part of his mission. “I can’t think of any younger Indian writers who are multi-genre like I am,” he said. “In fact, it seems like most of them are poets. And besides Louise Erdrich, I feel like the only one who’s not a college professor. Where are the Indian mystery writers and romance novelists?”

A lot of time and energy go into Mr. Alexie’s being more than just a writer, and into his efforts to define and expand the kind of writing career he is able to have.

“I’ve always plotted it out this way, being aware of who your audience is and trying to build one,” he said, referring to “Diary” in particular. “The most dedicated readers in the country are teenagers. I did a study of Y.A. novels when I was figuring mine out — I read hundreds of them.” Besides, he said, “if a 15-year-old doesn’t want to read me, what good am I?”

A few weeks ago Mr. Alexie attended a fund-raising lunch for the Seattle Children’s PlayGarden, an activity center tailored to special-needs children. (Mr. Alexie was born with hydrocephalus, which causes the brain to swell with excess fluid.) He was the featured speaker, charged to “do the ask,” as he put it, toward the end of the meal.

“In a real-world way, my gifts are very limited in terms of what I can do,” he said. He spends a lot of his time with charitable work and speaking on college campuses, so much that he now employs a full-time assistant. “Her job is basically to say no to people,” he said.

At the PlayGarden event he was alternately heart-wrenching and funny, with a joke about how being hydrocephalic caused him to walk unevenly, as if he were carrying the burden of his race on his shoulders. He talked poignantly about how he never learned to swim because the pressure hurt his head. Then he got a laugh when he described his older son’s declining to participate in a PlayGarden talent show.

“It was a strange thing to hear from my son,” he said, imitating his own response. “ ‘What, you don’t need the love and attention of total strangers to validate your existence?’ ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/books/21alexie.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateemb4