Book Review: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian

“If it’s fiction, it better be true.”

When I saw Sherman Alexie give the keynote speech at the Public Library Awards ceremony at the American Library Association annual conference in Anaheim last month, he attributed the quote to the Native American poet Simon Ortiz. If you Google the phrase, however, what will happen is that you will learn that Sherman Alexie is really fond of quoting it. In fact, you might be led to believe he originated it. Oh well. Oh well. Whether Alexie or Ortiz or someone completely imaginary actually first said it, it’s still true.

I first heard of Alexie’s young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian because it appeared on the ALA’s list of the Top Ten Challenged Books of 2010. And of 2011. When it was published in 2007 it won a National Book Award for Young People’s Literature and a host of other awards. I don’t know why it seems it took a few years for people to start wanting to ban it badly enough to make the ALA’s list, but if they hadn’t, I still may not have heard of it by now, despite all of its accolades. So it just goes to show that by trying to censor things you make them more famous.

It was the fact that Sherman Alexie was speaking at the conference I was attending that caused me to actually pull the book off the shelf and read it. I figured his keynote speech would be a lot more interesting to me if I were familiar with his work. It turned out to be extremely interesting to me. It would have been interesting to me even if I weren’t going to see the author speak at a librarian conference, but sometimes the universe needs to give you a little push to get you to read something you’re supposed to.

The main thing that strikes me about The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was the way that it so seamlessly married the comic and the tragic. I read about characters dying and the ugliness of alcoholism on pages that made me laugh out loud. Our fourteen-year-old protagonist and narrator recognizes this about life’s great beauty and absurdity when his mother starts a collective laugh attack at his grandmother’s funeral: “And I realized that, sure, Indians were drunk and sad and displaced and crazy and mean but dang we knew how to laugh.”

While tackling some very serious and somber matters, the book is a quick breeze to read and made a great airplane companion for me. I loved the illustrations by Ellen Forney and believe her contributions to the story probably deserve a lot more attention than they get. At the end of the paperback edition of the book I read, there is a fascinating interview with Forney that I enjoyed nearly as much as the novel itself. She describes how she and Alexie worked together to create the story and the character of teenage artist Arnold Spirit, and how she would capture his different moods and situations by the different styles of sketches we see in the book, supposedly drawn by Arnold. She paid to attention to such things as how much time she thought Arnold spent observing his drawing subjects, or whether he was taking his portrait of a person in his life from a photograph or in his subject’s actual presence. She also describes her frustration with at first “trying” to draw like a fourteen-year-old boy, and then relaxing into drawing things just as she would herself (I think that decision probably led to making the fiction a lot more “true”). Her description of the process sounds a lot like acting, and I was reminded of animators saying that their craft is analogous to “acting on paper.” I would give Ellen Forney an Oscar for paper acting.

Especially since Arnold Spirit’s voice seems to be very much that of Sherman Alexie’s. The man I heard at the American Library Association conference certainly spoke exactly like I would expect a grown-up Arnold Spirit to speak. And the novel is heavily autobiographical; in fact, it apparently started out as a straight-out memoir before it morphed info fiction. Arnold shares Sherman’s hydrocephalus and alcoholic father, and the main plot point of Part-Time Indian is taken from Alexie’s own decision to attend a high school away from the SpokaneIndian reservation where he lived.

Why is the book challenged so much? Reasons cited by the ALA are “offensive language, racism, sex education, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group, and violence.” To me, the book is the tale of a bright, decent boy in the age group trying to navigate a world full of all those other things. I’ve seen more than one review compare Arnold Spirit to Holden Caulfield, but I think that may because it’s too easy to compare all teenage boy narrators of modern American novels to Holden Caulfield. To me, Arnold more recalls Huckleberry Finn. He’s caught in the same rock and hard place between societal expectations and his own conscience. As Arnold’s friend Gordy puts it, "life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community." Arnold marvels at Gordy’s nerdy way of putting things, but he nails Arnold’s dilemma of trying to make a better life for himself without feeling like he’s betraying his extended family on the Spokane Reservation.

Whether their parents like it or not, adolescents, especially kids in circumstances like Arnold’s, are going to face some ugly, hard stuff in their lives. Life doesn’t wait for them to grow up so that they can handle it first. And, as Alexie has said, “there’s nothing in my book that even compares to what kids can find on the Internet.” Life can be so rude to young people. I’m glad that at least The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian gives them a fictional friend who tells the truth.