When you make a blog title, I think you should put something definitive and current, so that when it’s searched, people will find your blog and read it. This is what I do. This is my sad life.
I want to make something clear: I think Sherman Alexie is one of the great American writers of my time. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a seminal work in the examination of the modern American short story. Reservation Blues was a beautiful novel. His follow-up story collections The Toughest Indian in the World and Ten Little Indians weren’t as good, but they still stunned me, made me happy I spent the time with them. How could they match up with Lone Ranger…anyway? A writer can spend a decade on his first book, writing, rewriting, revising, revising…replacing one story with the next. The first book is the raw talent, the culmination of all those years of dreaming and enthusiasm. When you write the second, third, etc. I imagine that a writer is turning over new thoughts in a relatively short amount of time, especially when he wants to keep the rage moving forward, wants not to fall out of the public eye, wants not to be a one-hit wonder.
When an author writes a great book, he signs a book contract. If it’s a phenomenal book, he might sign a multi-book deal that requires him to write two, three, four books in a given span of time. A writer like Sherman Alexie strikes me as a slam dunk for a contract like that. A few of his books were published by Grove/Atlantic: paperback reissues, paperback originals, hardcover AND paperback…He must have had a hefty contract, although I don’t know for sure.
His next book comes out in September: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Little, Brown and Co. is publishing it…
His last book, Flight, was released by Grove/Atlantic a few months ago — like two and a half months ago. When I read the book, I was mauled, but not in the good way. I thought it was one of the worst books I have read in the last five years and by far the worst book I’ve read this year. Sherman Alexie insulted me and wasted my time for the two or three days I spent with his book.
When I finished the book, I looked for the publisher: Black Cat (an original publisher of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.). Then I found out that Grove/Atlantic published a few of his previous books. Meshing all that with the fact that he’s gone with Little, Brown for the next novel…and that the books were released so close to one another…I could only deduce that Flight was a poorly conceived and written, 181-page writing assignment.
The type was so big that I thought I had an impaired-vision version of the book. Now I realize that the publisher had to make the type that large in order for it to be even 181 pages. There has to be a term in the business for a book like this, even if it’s an insider’s term: “money making reading for suckers”; a “let’s get this over with” book; a “treat your readership like they’re fucking imbeciles” book. If someone knows the term for a lousy book that is published just because of the name recognition or a desperate fulfillment of a contract, please enlighten me.
Flight is about a teenager, Zits, who has bounced around different foster homes all his life. Troubled kid, no friends, aimless youth, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. — a perfect beginner’s lesson in archetype.
The troubled teen, in bitter resignation of what he is and what he can never be, plans a final and violent send off — one that will kill him along with some innocent people. We understand that he’s dead, but that he is suddenly reanimated, in barely connected chapters, as an FBI agent during the civil rights era; an indian child during Little Big Horn; and as an airplane pilot. In the end, he hasn’t killed anyone…He comes to a startling realization that he matters as a human being, he gets therapy, there’s hope, the end.
What is this? Is Black Cat a fledgling subsidiary press that needed a name to get their little company off the ground? Am I being too cynical?
Maybe. But when I get done with the book, find it insulting, and then read in the “Black Cat Reading Guide” of the comparison of Zits to literary figures like Kafka’s Gregor and Captain Ahab, I find it a little hard not to smirk.
Captain Ahab wouldn’t have wiped his tender bottom with this book, and the disturbing thing is: I think Sherman Alexie knows it.
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Why are you always ragging on all these authors? And where were you yesterday? I’m reading “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”, and I have about ten new pieces to show you.
Oh, and click on my name for a link to my new blog…
Right after I posted the entry, I snooped around for articles and other reviews of the book. I came across an article on an incident Alexie had with a Denver Post reporter, who wrote unfavorably about the book. She accused his publisher of putting it out as a paperback original because they were embarrassed by the quality of his work. Alexie launched a tirade against the woman…He’s a little too defensive…
Poor Sherman. It’s hard to live in the shadow of Herman Melville.
thanks for indulging me on the mfa question. btw, i heard columbia’s rep is going down, lots of nasty gossip there…if i were to go anywhere, i don’t know i’d choose columbia anyway since i did my undergraduate (haha, as if i’d get in!) there, but i do love new york. interesting how you said it didn’t help your writing… my biggest concern about an mfa is i’ve heard from editor friends that sometimes mfas come out way too “cookiecutter” and formulaic, as if their creativity were beaten out of them, in order to follow certain rules or cannons. i wonder how true that is. i’d like to become tighter in how i approach things, learn the craft better and help elevate my writing, but i also don’t want to box myself in too much by what i’ve learned. but you said it helped you with your instincts. i think i have a pretty decent instinct with my writing right now, so i wonder if an mfa would enhance that or take it away. of course, becoming a more careful reader is a plus…
i’m babbling again, sorry.
btw your post makes me think again of all the times i’ve gotten angry at the industry for making it so that there’s so much bad writing on the shelves, and some perfectly good writers probably never see the light of day. as much as i’d like to hold on to an ideal of writing as an “art”, there’s no denying the hand of capitalism and $$$$ on what’s available these days. which. totally sucks. hopefully alexie will move past this, and write some new books that will restore your faith in him as a writer…. (i’ve never read him, so i can’t comment on his writing at all)
To me, Sherman Alexie’s kind of writing is largely experimental in all forms:poetry, music, short stories, novels, teen books and maybe even comics soon since he seems to do his best as a stand-up comedian these days. His stories and poetry have always reflected the life and times he’s living in and those “Lone Ranger” stories were written way back in the mid-nineties when reservation life was most familiar. His books move along with him, in different directions, off the reservation to a middle class and then upper middle class existence. Before “Flight” he never dared to explore a white character as he now does with the flight instructor because he had no feeling of what it was to be white. Writers have a right to experiment with anything and it’s up to us whether or not we want purchase the material.I’m a writer for “Ocean Drive” which is a glamour magazine but I’ve done so many technical, environmental and holistic articles in the last 20 years for magazines all over the world in 7 different languages, and a big book on UFO’s.There was a time that I was writing articles solely about the space program and I was getting terribly bored with myself. There is nothing wrong with being versatile and changing styles and formats.You are right in that often a first book is the best one as far as concept and style and personalization, but then it’s the reader who always wants to see more from the writer, and preferably a novel, prompting the publisher to lay out a particular contract that usually includes novel writing as a part of the deal. Personally,I think Alexie does his best work as a poet but a publisher wants a project that will sell and poetry is never high on the list. This is why his poetry will likely forever be published by Hanging Loose Press which is far less prestigious than Grove.
I agree completely that an author has every right to go outside of his or her comfort zone to explore narrative. I’m not convinced that this was the case with Flight. I mean, sure, the flight instructor was white, but even the indian characters lacked depth. I appreciate the read and the attention to my blog…Thank you.
Speaking of – you probably already know, but just in case, I read this in publisher’s weekly:
Native American author Sherman Alexie drew from his adolescence to write his first book for young adults, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Illustrated by Ellen Forney, the novel is due from Little, Brown in September with a 100,000-copy first printing. The plot, which centers on a budding cartoonist who leaves the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white high school, closely parallels Alexie’s own teenage years. Little, Brown has produced a discussion guide to the novel and is sending Alexie on a tour that will encompass at least 12 cities.
Hey, late late late though I am in joining your commentators I do hope you listen to the sweet notions offered by Jonathan Saffron Foer who said during an interview with Vicoria Lautman on her Chicago Public Radio show “Writers on the Record” that bad books are necessary in order for good books to exist. Perhaps the blogging community should consider this whilst we critique writers as they work to put bread on their tables. Do you yourself write prose? It certainly is not easy. I think Alexie has perspective about his place in the so called canon of literary writers. Though he may wax arrogant, a silver humility always peeks out and readers who are looking for his brand of humanity allow for good days as well as bad.
Thanks for the commentary. Sherman Alexie working to put “bread of his table” is a little dramatic. I do want to check out that radio show, though — especially since I live in Chicago now.
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