War Dances - book

War Dances, Sherman Alexie (Grove Press, N.Y., 2009)

I rarely read fiction anymore, and even more rarely, contemporary short stories. But as I was desperate for something to read, and our small (but fine) library failed to produce any new non-fiction work I was interested in reading, I checked out this book of short stories by Sherman Alexie, knowing that he had recently won The National Book Award (for his book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, that I have not read). While I found the stories and poems collected in War Dances of interest, I cannot honestly claim to have truly enjoyed them. Interestingly enough, my failure to enjoy them is not, I think, because Alexie is an Indian, and also not because he is an ungifted writer. He seems to have come a long way from his earlier Angry Young Indian persona, and has obviously matured as a writer, although he understandably continues writing mostly about being an Indian and Indian themes. In addition to his novels, short stories, and screenplays, he is also importantly a poet.

I suspect the reason I did not enjoy this book is the same reason that keeps me from reading contemporary fiction in general. For the most part I don’t find it enjoyable. I am, perhaps I should not admit it, old-fashioned when it comes to fiction. First, I want to enjoy it, not receive lessons on sociology and prejudice, but the themes that seem to predominate these days are usually dark and somewhat unpleasant. Second, I want a story, that is, something with a plot, a beginning, a question or problem, and an end. Much of today’s fiction seems to me to consist more of encounters, experiences, confrontations, stream-of-consciousness accounts that often seem written more for the sake of writing something than to tell a coherent story. I can’t say there is necessarily anything wrong with this type of prose, it’s just that I don’t usually enjoy it. Third, I object to the language. I am not particularly prudish about language and I don’t mind an occasional “fucking,” or “shit,” or even “mother-fucker,” if they seem really necessary (which is not usually the case in my opinion), but when such words occupy so much of the text they dominate it, I object. I believe writing in the language of the gutter, so to speak, is basically an insult to our language in general, our beautiful English language that deserves to be cherished, promoted, and enjoyed to its limits. If contemporary writers are hung up on realism and want to write about people who speak only in obscenities that is their right, but I don’t particularly want to read it, certainly not with the frequency with which it currently seems to occur. I take no umbrage at the so-called “free-speech movement,” that convinced people that words were really just words and should not have such shock value, and I enjoyed the pioneers like Lennie Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and others, but I did not interpret their message to mean that our literature should suddenly consist mostly of “shit, piss, fuck,” (the favorite expression of one of my friends whenever he was upset or frustrated), or that it should come to predominate our literature as it seems to be doing.

Contemporary fiction obviously reflects themes that our culture has become preoccupied with in recent years, so we have writers dealing with crime, addiction, war, homosexuality, and other such themes that formerly were not so prominent. It is in the nature of the case that such themes tend to be unpleasant, just as the language associated with them is in ways unpleasant. Thus it is understandable that Alexie, for example, can write of his father dying a “normal” Indian death of alcoholism and diabetes, or the killing with a baseball bat of an intruder stealing his videotapes, or how the inmates in a prison would treat Bruce Lee. I think he is at his best, however, when he recounts how he was hired to write a screenplay and then ordered to change it in ways that made no sense (“Fearful Symmetry”). I cannot explain why, when I read one of the feature stories (“The Ballad of Paul Nonetheless”), I could not escape the eerie feeling I was reading Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Banana Fish.” The two stories, quite different in terms of content, do seem to me to be similar in some ways, perhaps in their surreality. There are a few poems included in War Dances. Here, too, I have a problem, because I do not understand poetry very well and I find most contemporary poetry even harder to understand than the more classical stuff. I guess Alexie is considered a competent and talented poet. You couldn’t prove it by me as I am completely “tone deaf” when it comes to poetry, especially modern poetry.

I suppose my, shall I say, “discontent” with contemporary fiction is a result of my having lived for so long. I just do not like “modern art” in general: painting, sculpture, design, architecture, music, you name it. When I want to read short stories or novels I always return to the past; masters like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Wolfe (I know, I know, he’s passé at the moment), and others. One of my all-time favorites, a genuine story-teller, is W. Somerset Maugham, who writes wonderful stories in a fine but not ostentatious prose style. All of these writers, and many more, wrote wonderful short stories and novels without all the “potty talk,” and I, for one, think our literature was all the better for it.

But do not let my out-of-fashion opinions keep you from reading (and possibly enjoying) War Dances. Sherman Alexie does have interesting things to say, an active imagination, unusual themes, and a gift for writing poetry and prose.