Review
Gazelle Emami
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
nists — unfaithful wife, accidental murderer, washed-up
basketball star who cries too easily, alcoholic father, 7/11
worker — many of whom represent exaggerated pieces
of his own personality. Their stories are all distinct and
self-contained, but together they impress a strong sense
of mood, a sadness that drifts from one into the next.
Strangely, amid all these downers, Alexie is able to keep
your spirits up by toggling between sorrow and humor,
and skillfully crisscrossing the two. “Lonely and laughing”
is the sort of image evoked often in his characters, who
wobble between sanity and madness. The laughter keeps
them sane, the loneliness drives them mad, and sometimes,
you’re not sure which is which.
Grief is a trickier beast to laugh off (“Mr. Grief always
wins,” we’re reminded), and it’s what pushes Alexie’s characters fully into madness. In “Breakfast,” a son cracks an
egg and sees his father’s “impossibly small corpse” floating
in the mixing bowl. In “Salt,” a senile widow thinks pouring
salt on her husband could return him to her. As crazy as his
grief-driven imagery is, it bristles with realism by meeting
his characters’ pain at eye-level.
For every grieving widow, you also have a compulsive
joker who is full of tumors (“my favorite tumor is just
about the size of a baseball”), a cop amazed by a homeless man’s good humor (“You Indians. How the hell do you
laugh so much?”). Alexie’s heroes are losers in the most
expansive sense of the word, and by making them laugh, he
nods at how his culture has often responded to losing.
Toward the end of this 480-page collection, these heroes begin to wear a little thin. But for the most part, each
story is a page turner, the longest hitting 57 pages, and the
shortest falling just under one. Long or short, Blasphemy’s
stories feels like a series of literary sprints, each one quickening your heart rate and leaving you pausing to catch your
breath before you’re on to the next.