A colleague of mine lent me this wonderful novel, which won the National Book Foundation Award for Young People’s Literature. With the exception of the Harry Potter collection, I don’t find myself reading too many books aimed for readers in grades 6-10, so I didn’t know what to expect. Would this be a silly, flattened version of Alexie’s otherwise powerful writing, or would he infuse this novel with smart, nuanced ideas engaging to young and old readers alike? I can say emphatically that the latter is the case. I will admit that I have a bias here–I find Alexie to be one of the strongest writers today, and I teach his work nearly every semester. I also thoroughly enjoyed his other 2007 novel, Flight, which draws together fantasy with history and an alarming ability to deftly (if briefly) show how different historical figures experienced cultural clash and destruction.
I was therefore happy to see that in The Absolutely True Diary Alexie refuses to play it safe for younger readers and instead offers a moving account of a boy torn between his family and friends on the Spokane Indian Reservation and his decision to attend a primarily-white school off the rez. At once humorous and moving, the novel begs us to view the complex world through Junior’s eyes, and by the end, rather than erasing doubt from a young reader’s imagination, Alexie has somehow managed to leave Junior’s world as frightening, funny, and sad as it began. That is, he concludes the novel convincingly without silencing any of the powerful ambiguities that define his “adult” fiction, which is what I had feared going into this novel.
I would also add that there is little new here, and while “recycling” material might be a reason to dismiss some writers, for this novel it serves as a welcome addition to the characters and settings that populate Alexie’s canon. We have Junior, of course, who figures into Alexie’s other works, alongside an alcoholic father (sometimes pleasant and other times destructive), a caring if troubled mother, a cluster of friends–drunk and not, friendly and not–and a reservation that is, at once, both home and prison. We have seen these elements before, most notably in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, but for some reason they remain disturbingly fresh. I can only hope that The Absolutely True Diary serves to introduce a new generation of readers to the power and potential of Sherman Alexie’s writing.
