Review
WENDY GEORGE
Blasphemy: New
and Selected
Stories
By Sherman
Alexie
Grove Press
480 pages
October 2, 2012
Gazelle Emami
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
confusion here. Yes, his characters follow such culturally-specific
trajectories that their loneliness is
probably like no loneliness you’ve
ever known. Where Alexie trips
us up is by making such distinct
loneliness feel knowable.
Blasphemy, his latest collection of 30-odd short stories, is
shot through with an emotional
strain that’s come to characterize his writing. Equal parts old
favorites (“What You Pawn I Will
Redeem,” “The Toughest Indian
in the World, “War Dances”) and
new additions, it’s Alexie’s most
comprehensive collection to date,
and a powerful thwap against
mainstream knowledge of American Indians (largely written in cliches from the Dances With Wolves
school of learning).
The American Indian PEN/Faulkner winner for 2009’s
War Dances, Alexie grew up on a Spokane reservation
in Washington state, but the stories here concern themselves largely with urban Indians, living with one foot off
the reservation, and one foot perpetually in. Alexie tosses them in and around Seattle, with a host of identity
issues that come with leaving the reservation, or alternately, never being on it — rejecting identity, overidentification, guilt at not being Indian enough. (“I suppose
if you’re indigenous to a place and you’re still searching
for your identity, that’s pretty ironic,” Alexie once explained to the Atlantic.) Laying bare the modern Indian
psyche, he approaches it by way of his loserish protago-