Sherman's March

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Alexie does a lot of his writing at 3 a.m. at the International House of Pancakes in Seattle’s university district, close to his office and not too far from the home he shares with his wife, Diane, a college counselor and Hidatsa Indian, and their 3-year-old son. When he’s not traveling, his life is quiet. He spends time with his family in the evenings and meets up with his buddies for basketball every Tuesday.

Alexie has been dogged throughout his career by accusations from those still living at the Spokane reservation, that he is misrepresenting their lives for his own gain, embarrassing them. "The word that keeps coming back is responsibility," Alexie says. "They ask me to represent them, to the point where I’m not an artist. I’m a politician, or not even that, a propagandist. I’m supposed to be making public service announcements rather than creating art. I hate that. That kind of pressure is terrible."

On his book jackets in the past, Alexie has worn the same stoic too-cool-for-school Indian mask that he himself makes fun of. He calls it "the ethnic stare." On his new book, though, we see a photo of a man without the mask, taken by Rex Tystedt, the Seattle photographer who took the Cobain portrait that hangs on Alexie’s wall.

In the photo, Alexie wears a look of concern, gentleness, vulnerability—and pride. Is this the introvert? Or the guy who becomes the Indian Richard Pryor on stage? The insomniac scratching out verse at 3 a.m. in a Seattle pancake house? Or the screenwriter who takes lunch at Sunset Strip cafés? The poor rez boy who enjoys the power and privilege he once railed against? The guy who started as an outsider poet? Or the one who wants to be a mainstream pop-culture icon? A man who may not be telling the whole truth about the modern American Indian but is at least telling his own?

Sherman Alexie defied expectations from his first breath. Now he does it for the American literary world and, increasingly, the American public as well.

Russ Spencer is a freelance writer. 

From Book magazine. Subscriptions: $20/yr. (6 issues) from 18 Bank St., Summit, NJ 07901.

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