Loosely Collected and Tightly Bound

Last week, Sherman Alexie debuted his newest book, War
Dances, at Town Hall in a funny and often profane performance. (I
nearly felt sorry for the father who was forced to drag his teenage
daughter out of the sold-out performance hall not five minutes after
Alexie took the stage, but I was too busy laughing with everyone else
at Alexie’s story about his drunken father’s nickname for a
clitoris—”the little man in the boat”—to be too
concerned.)Between poems, stories, and fragments of memoir from
Dances, Alexie invited Sean Nelson onstage to perform ’80s
standards—”Borderline,” “They Don’t Know,” “Don’t You (Forget
About Me)”—on piano.

Nelson’s nostalgic performances perfectly echoed Alexie’s selections
(a poem lamenting the loss of pay phones; a reminiscence about watching
Enter the Dragon as a child in Spokane and leaving the theater
screaming and punching furiously at the air, convinced that Bruce Lee
was the toughest human being in the world). At the beginning of the
reading, Alexie grumpily noted that he had been doing press interviews
for his new book for a few weeks now, and not one book critic or
litblogger had, by the author’s own estimation, understood what War
Dances was about: “The whole book is a fuckin’ mixtape,” he
shouted, waving his arms with exasperation, and the statement was
possibly the truest thing he said all night. It became obvious once he
said it, and all the hints were there, waiting in the book for anyone
to uncover them: Parts of the book are even named like pieces of music
(“The Ballad of Paul Nonetheless” and “Ode for Pay Phones”), and
there’s a short story that serves as an elaborate cover song of an old
number by William Blake (“Fearful Symmetry”).

Dances is maybe the most personal book Alexie has ever
published (and if you’ve ever read anything by Alexie, you understand
how bold that statement really is), and it’s certainly one of his most
readable (ditto). The closest thing to a historical precedent for this
book is Palm Sunday, Kurt Vonnegut’s wildly entertaining
self-described “autobiographical collage” of anecdotes, fiction,
reminiscences, and other work. Dances begins with a short,
seemingly autobiographical, poem about helplessly watching someone try
to murder a dog, and it continues with a brutal short story about a
successful film editor who accidentally murders a teenager. More poems
and fiction follow, seemingly at random, with lists of memories and
several dialogues—of both the Socratic and Fénelonian
varieties—thrown in. It’s only when the reader gets about halfway
through the book that he realizes that this isn’t some scrap-heap
clearinghouse of everything that was left over on Alexie’s desk: Each
piece firmly builds on some part of the other, like the songs on a good
mixtape. Sometimes the following piece is the exact opposite of the
piece before it; Alexie is a kind enough host (and a nimble enough DJ)
to know that after you talk about death for too long, it’s good to let
out with a quick, frivolous poem about Star Wars and Legos to
cleanse the palate and provide a little balance.

But if Alexie intended for War Dances to be a
mixtape—and all of Alexie’s statements at the reading point to
this being his intention from the beginning—this raises another
question. Nobody makes a mixtape for themselves; mixtapes are always
compiled (and compiled with real effort, as Alexie explains in “Ode to
Mix Tapes”: “It sometimes took days/To play, choose, pause,/Ponder,
record, replay, erase/And replace… It was blue-collar work”) with a
recipient, a target, in mind. And he never explicitly stated whom this
mixtape is for.

But the Town Hall reading offered a tantalizing hint about the
intent of War Dances: Alexie barreled out of the gate with a
story about the Amazon Kindle e-reader. When Alexie was widely quoted
earlier this year as saying he wanted to hit a woman when he saw her
reading a Kindle on an airplane, he reported being surprised at the
outraged response. “Apparently, Kindle users don’t have a good
understanding of metaphor,” he said. And when Amazon gave Alexie a
Kindle to use, he remained unimpressed with the device, quoting a
friend who called reading on his Kindle “like masturbating with a
condom on.” Alexie then read “Ode to Mix Tapes” and responded to his
own piece by shutting the copy of War Dances he was reading
from and gloating, “Can’t fuckin’ do that with a Kindle.”

It’s possible that War Dances, with its continual
repetition of nostalgia, is a mixtape (itself an antiquated form of
communication) for the Kindle, a showboating collection of work
intended for the future from the past. The asymmetrical collection on
display in War Dances works as a supremely gratifying reading
experience in book form. You can turn one full page of text to find a
nearly blank next page, a few short words trailing around the whiteness
in a minimalist poem that leads to the next page, which is heavy with
tiny lines of italics and huge chunks of text cascading end over end.
Try to keep your eyes from being drawn into the call-and-response of a
dialogue after being left dangling at the end of a poem; it’s
impossible. Even the way the book ends, with a final indignant,
life-affirming shout at the world that leads into a blank page, is
intended for the book-reading experience. It’s the print version of
those few hissing seconds at the end of a recording before the sharp
SNAP of a tape recorder abruptly shutting itself off. And on a Kindle,
where, as another of Alexie’s friends put it, “every page is the first
page,” War Dances wouldn’t have nearly the kind of power that
it boasts in book form.

Alexie wears his nostalgia as a badge of honor. Before he began the
reading, he told the audience that he suspected that the shaky future
of the publishing industry meant that writers who were just getting
started today were not “going to be able to build their careers the way
I was,” and so he thanked the crowd “for staying with me through all
the good stuff and a lot of shit.” It could have been an overly
sentimental, drunken toast by a dewy-eyed old man at the end of a
particularly raucous night of drinking. And it felt painfully true,
too.