You almost seem to be staking out territory on the literary side of that divide, and having to defend yourself to both sides. The pressure of straddling two worlds comes through in “Lone Ranger.” In “A Good Story,” the gap is represented by the sweetest bit of postmodernist breaking of the fourth wall, in which you, the author, seem to be lying on the couch and your mother pleads with you to “write a story about something good.”Īnother example of the disparate worlds you’ve suddenly found yourself straddling is one of my all-time-favorite stories, “The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire,” which begins with a wonderfully apt epigraph from Kafka’s “The Trial”: “Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Your name, your boy’s name: Joseph. The book won the PEN / Hemingway Award for best first fiction and garnered even more praise, but it must have felt like even more weight every writer dreams of “stunning” and “dazzling,” but the Chicago Tribune writing, “ The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is for the American Indian what Richard Wright’s Native Son was for the black American in 1940”-what does a twenty-six-year-old do with that? To follow those reviews with a book like “Lone Ranger,” is, frankly, kind of fucking remarkable. I remember so clearly the reviews you were getting, and especially that phrase from the New York Times Book Review’ s cover story on “The Business of Fancydancing”-“one of the major lyric voices of our time”-but I couldn’t have comprehended the pressure that such praise brings, especially the identity component of it, and so early in your writing life. (My own unfortunate mullet included a braided rattail-just in case I wasn’t white trash enough.) And in your author photo from that time there is a fierce, steady engagement in your eyes that reflects exactly that quality in the book-you are drawn in by the humor, the sorrow, and the anger over injustice, the steady and unblinking cost of admission. J.W.: Yes, undoubtedly: Chief Joseph’s business in front carries more power and meaning than say, Brian Bosworth’s. My mullet said to the literary world, “Hello, you privileged prep-school assholes, I’m here to steal your thunder, lightning, and book sales.” And it felt epic, scary, and dangerous for many years. The contrast between my literary life and my real life was epic. Army surplus bed in the unfinished basement bedroom in my family’s government-built house. I was called “one of the major lyric voices of our time” while I was sleeping in a U.S. When “The Lone Ranger” was published, I was being fêted by the publishing world while I was back living on the rez, after college. Looking at my hair through a slightly more serious lens, I think I wore such an exaggerated mullet as a means of aggressively declaring my Indian identity.
0 kommentar(er)
