“At the end of March, I started up at school, and after school I spent the afternoons until dinner at the community center—rusted roof, yellow walls—playing basketball on the concrete floor with some of the kids in my class, and it took no time falling into that place, feeling that I had been there my whole life and that I’d not been plucked out of my bed in the middle of the night with a fever and driven way, way north to where Mom had grown up.”
This quote in this particular story specifically references the community center, but the subtext being expressed could equally be applied to any story in the collection about reservation life in general. The setting is always of central importance to stories about life on Native American reservations because more so than in most coming-of-age tales, the setting dramatically informs characterization, themes, and incidents. Life on the “rez” is one of the last remaining examples of the kind of culturally self-contained community not impacted by diversity. A 21st-century collection of stories set on a reservation such as this book is like a throwback to the stories of entire neighborhoods in New York City populated almost exclusively by Irish or Italian immigrants. That expression of feeling as though one has been in some place their “whole life” can just as easily be a description of a warm nurturing cocoon one never wants to leave as it can be a description of a stifling prison one can’t wait to escape. Throughout the stories in the collection, the reservation is implicated at various times as representing both interpretations. The idea of familiarity with a place expanding to mean familiarity with people and experience is given shape and form by the blurring of the distinction between the site of the community center and the place he had called home before he went to bed that fateful feverish night.
“The ECT waiting room, where I’d been waiting for Fellis and trying to remember the third thing that needed to be done that afternoon, didn’t have a bathroom…As always, I got all turned around. The hallways spread out from the main building in every direction like spider legs, except unlike spider legs they crisscrossed and forked and even intersected a few times, open junctions with numerous paths to outpatient services like Mood and Memory.”
The mental health facility to which David takes his friend for his shock treatment therapy is obviously not on the reservation. This story opens with an extended section detailing David’s attempt to locate a bathroom that is usable somewhere on the premises and the spatial and social difficulties associated with attaining success. This opening becomes a portrait of the opposite of the situation above. While the reservation means familiarity, leaving it becomes an adventure in which the liminality begins to fall apart. The reservation is not merely an actual geographical space, therefore, but also a philosophical perception. David’s description of the hospital corridors presenting a confusing awareness of its spatial geometry seems like the perfect opportunity to introduce the metaphor of a maze. Except that the architectural layout—or, at least David’s perception of it—does not follow the standard right-angle template of a labyrinth. Instead, David invokes the imagery of a spider—but here again, expectations are subverted. Rather than comparing the architectural layout to a perfect geometrical design of a spiderweb, it is compared to the actual spider. Within the context of being in a facility to treat mental health issues, David’s inability to work his way through the hallways to find someplace private in which to urinate while also experiencing memory difficulties begins to take on the aspect of a nightmare. Which, philosophically at least, is what the world away from the familiarity of the reservation might just seem to be.
“Winter, and I walked the sidewalk at night along banks of hard snow. I’d come from Rab’s apartment off the reservation. Rab—this white guy with a wide mouth and eyes that closed up when he laughed—sold pot.”
The opening lines of the opening story in the collection situate a few elements that will recur throughout the entire volume. Several of the stories take place in the midst of snowfall. Many of the stories include references to drug use and addiction. While there are not a whole lot of white characters in the stories, when they do appear, they mostly serve a purpose or fulfill a need that can’t be met on the reservation. And even when surrounded by family or friends, David’s narration always seems to carry a tone of personal alienation and isolation. All these various aspects combine together to present a portrait of life both deeply connected and disconnected. Even on the reservation where things are familiar, there is a sense that David does not really feel bonded to his surroundings in any deep sense. And, of course, off the reservation, the alienation is even tangible not just when the familiarity becomes detached but even when engaged with known entities such as Rab. On a grander level, of course, this could be interpreted as a microcosmic portrait of the alienation and isolation of the Native Americans within the larger American societal order.
