Double identity

Sherman ALEXIE has a confession: He wants to be Philip Roth. Not as a stylist -- although both authors do use humor to get at uncomfortable subjects. Nor as a personality: He’s much too open, too, well, friendly, someone who laughs and rhapsodizes and engages, who won’t leave a reading until every book is signed. No, what Alexie has in mind is more Roth’s impact, the way the older writer’s novels reach out of an insular and often denigrated culture to demand attention from the larger world.

“Nobody has done it yet,” Alexie says, sitting in a small Asian barbecue restaurant tucked high inside the concrete beehive of the Bonaventure Hotel. “Native American literature has not caught up to the rest of literature. In terms of quality, in terms of quantity, in terms of worldview, we’re still very provincial. I’m trying to be the kind of writer Philip Roth is, who can minutely examine these people, this tribe, but do it in such a way that it just explodes for everybody. Right now, I do it in a way that Indians and people predisposed to being interested in Indians respond to. But I haven’t gone outside that. We haven’t gone outside that.”

Alexie sits back and takes a forkful of rice and chicken, a slow grin starting to creep across his face. What he’s just done, of course, is to lob a bomb into the very heart of literary complacency, a bomb that he is perhaps uniquely qualified to throw. For the last decade or so, the Spokane-Coeur d’Alene Indian, who stopped in L.A. to do a reading at the downtown Central Library, has been among the most visible Native American authors, his work profoundly personal and deeply connective at once. Yet unlike many writers who are identified with a particular community, Alexie has gone out of his way to avoid being pigeonholed.

Since the publication of his first book, the 1991 poetry collection “The Business of Fancydancing,” he has released seven subsequent volumes of verse, as well as two novels and two short fiction collections; he’s also adapted several of his stories into a screenplay, and directed a feature film loosely derived from his first book. Through it all, he has sought to expand the way Native Americans are portrayed in contemporary culture, demystifying the stereotypes, pro and con, in favor of a more nuanced point of view.

Sometimes, as in “The Search Engine,” the first story in his new collection, “Ten Little Indians” (Grove), that means taking on a subject like reverse discrimination, the unexpected benefits of liberal guilt. “We’ve been bombarded with so much negative imagery our entire existence in this country,” Alexie says, “that we grab onto anything positive because it’s such a relief. Also, it’s a way for us to profit. I mean, we’re human beings, so if people are willing to give us breaks because we’re Indians, we’re going to take advantage. And nobody talks about that.”

“Ten Little Indians” deals with a lot of things nobody talks about, from the always loaded subject of cultural authenticity to the influence of politics on everyday life. The collection’s nine stories revolve around characters who don’t appear much in the Native American mythos -- college students and businessmen; an aspiring politician; a suburban wife and mother looking for an alternative to her constrained life. Although Alexie didn’t write the stories as a set, he does see certain affinities, beginning with the fact that all take place in Seattle -- where he lives with his wife and two young children -- and involve mostly middle-class concerns.

In some sense, he suggests, this is a reaction to the way so much Native American literature unfolds on reservations, as if “the story isn’t authentic unless you’re writing about the rez.” Equally important is his belief that such writing no longer reflects the experience of many Indians, 70% of whom lead urban lives, he says.

“This is what I mean when I say we haven’t caught up yet,” he explains. “We’re still trying to figure out who we are. In order to feel more Indian, we write about the rez because that seems most authentic. So I knew from the beginning that I was going to try to represent this reality of Native American life.”

At the same time, “Ten Little Indians” has a political agenda: to present Native Americans in a different light. “Even if it isn’t necessarily accurate to have a whole book filled with white-collar Indians,” Alexie admits, “it is important to say to the world, ‘These are the possibilities.’ And to say to Indian people, especially young Indian people, ‘You can become a doctor or a lawyer and have this life. It’s still going to be difficult, and filled with pain and loss, but you can do this.’ Just presenting an Indian lawyer matter-of-factly, an Indian architect matter-of-factly, I think, has a social function for Indian people who read it. It helps to open minds.”

Of all the stories in “Ten Little Indians,” perhaps none is as mind-opening as “Can I Get a Witness?,” in which an office worker survives a suicide bombing at a Seattle restaurant, then uses it as the impetus to walk away from her life. Here, Alexie steps outside Native American experience almost entirely, addressing the complexities of fear and terror instead. As the story progresses, we begin to see the bombing as an uneasy source of liberation, a way for the character to make her escape.

“To tell a story like this, you have to focus on the people,” Alexie says. “If the A story is the bombing, the B story is more personal -- it’s a woman unhappy with her life. So how does her unhappiness reflect on national politics? That’s the question I want to raise.”

Seeing through literature

As to why such a question is important ... well, Alexie stresses, literature can take big events, big social shifts, and let us see them, really see them, by focusing on their most individual parts. This is why “Can I Get a Witness?” doesn’t deal with the World Trade Center, even though that was the story’s inspiration; it would overwhelm the idea of personal change.

“When I was watching the coverage of the trade center, I remember thinking, somebody drunk is going to sober up,” Alexie recalls. “Somebody’s going to walk out of the ashes and say, ‘I’m quitting my job, I’m going to teach third grade, I’m leaving my husband for the one I really love.’ ... I think of Emily Dickinson’s line, ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes.’ Part of what she’s saying is that after great pain, there’s ceremony. Plenty of people use great pain, and the ceremony afterward, to change their lives. So there is value in what happened, which is what I want to explore.”

The idea that an act of terror might in some strange sense lead to a moment of personal liberation is a revolutionary notion, though one other writers have also explored. Ask Alexie about it, however, and he’ll tell you he should have pushed it further, that he did not dig deep enough. In particular, he wishes he’d focused more on the story’s male character, a white man who designs violent computer games, including one in which the gamer plays a terrorist who shoots civilians. Such a game only heightens the complexity of the narrative, its layers of contradiction and complicity, which Alexie thinks he missed. “I needed more of the video game stuff,” he says. “I needed more of him. And I didn’t do it. I stayed away from it because he’s white.”

That’s the flip side of the identity question that Alexie deals with daily as a Native American, the issue of authenticity and authority. If, as he suggests, Native American writers are still struggling to encapsulate, or even define, their experience, how can they even begin to look outside? The paradox, Alexie argues, is that only by attempting the latter can they hope to approach the former, and understand their relationship to the culture at large.

“No matter what quantity of blood I have as an Indian, I’m white too, because I grew up in white culture and live in it now,” Alexie says. “In fact, most of the time, people don’t see me as Indian. They know I’m something, but I’m generally confused for whatever the dominant ethnic group in the area is. So in L.A., I’m Mexican. Walking in Pasadena this morning, a Jehovah’s Witness began to proselytize me in Spanish. And I let her. I kept on saying, ‘Si, si.’ I didn’t know what she was saying. She was a white woman speaking in Spanish about Jehovah. To an Indian.”

If ever there were a metaphor for culture clash, this is it, and Alexie laughs as he describes the scene. But there’s a serious aspect to all this also, which is the way literature can eclipse our differences, by offering a human core.

Dual purpose at work

Alexie has begun a story about a white supremacist -- “I want to jump into his head. I want him to feel absolutely right, completely justified in an act of violence, and have the story reveal his reasoning” -- which, when completed, will be the first piece of his writing in which no Native Americans appear.

As always, there’s a dual purpose at work here, a way in which the author’s aesthetic and political visions start to merge. On the one hand, Alexie says, “my wife is always challenging me to write my ‘Remains of the Day.’ And it’s welling; I can feel it. But the artistic challenge is pretty intense and amazing.”

Then, of course, there’s the idea of context, the notion that a writer cannot help but frame his work in reference to the broader world.

“After Sept. 11,” Alexie says, “I sort of made a personal vow to let go of as much of my tribalism as I can. My identification with any one group. That’s because of the tribal act that [the attack] was, and then our tribal response, our continuing tribal response. So by letting go of that, personally, politically, artistically, I’ve been getting the courage to do other things.”

He is willing to lay the groundwork, to expand the territory of his stories, to attract new generations of readers, and open up our understanding of what Native American literature can be. If he can’t be Philip Roth just yet, he says, “I want to be at least as interesting as Eminem. And the thing is, if you put me and Eminem in a room with 50 kids, and you give me two hours, they’ll walk away from Eminem. You give me two hours and I will beat Eminem. He’ll have them for the first hour and a half, but I’ll wear them down.”