Finding the father within

By Sherman Alexie

Grove Press. 256 pp. $23

Reviewed by Elizabeth Mosier

'I grew up in that space between my father's enormous potential and everything he did not accomplish," Sherman Alexie, who bears the name engraved on his father's tombstone, has said.

The acclaimed writer of poems, stories, screenplays, and novels may feel that gap personally, as audience expectation, after receiving the National Book Award for Young People's Literature for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. But Alexie makes an art of resisting expectation; questioning the status quo seems to be his literary and personal survival strategy. Though his latest work, War Dances, may be drawn from the same wellspring as The Absolutely True Diary, a coming-of-age tale, this slim, yet powerful and perfectly ordered collection of stories and poems is a different kind of journey through unfamiliar territory - one that seeks to understand the causes of modern men's alienation, whatever tribe they've wandered from or tried to claim.

"I miss him, the drunk bastard," Alexie laments in the title story, structured as a series of numbered and subtitled parts. His narrative logic is associative, beginning with a stowaway cockroach ("My Kafka Baggage") discovered in his luggage, tracing his sudden hearing loss to his father's decline ("Blankets"), and finally annotating the version of his father he's preserved in a poem ("Exit Interview for My Father").

In "Blankets," he depicts his father, a diabetic alcoholic, in the hospital after surgical amputation of half of one foot and three toes of the other. "There was no privacy, not even a thin curtain," he writes. "I guessed it made it easier for the nurses to monitor the postsurgical patients, but still, my father was exposed - his decades of poor health and worse decisions illuminated - on white sheets in a white hallway under white lights." It's a devastating image, one that resonates ("Valediction") with the burning light his father sees, on his deathbed, as "God passing judgment on Earth."