Alexie takes off the rose colored glasses. (Review).

Porcupines and China Dolls 

By Robert Arthur Alexie Stoddart

286 pp., $32.95 (hc)

Some people believe that Aboriginal literature should only talk about sweatlodge ceremonies, healing circles, and powwows--feel-good stuff that often ends up reading like a New Age sell-help manual due to its didactic style and sanctimonious tone.

Porcupines and China Dolls isn't that kind of book. If you want that kind of book, there are plenty to choose from, all decorated in the same fluffs and feathers. But if you want a book that challenges accepted norms about AbLit (both content and style) and challenges readers to look at the concept of healing from a different perspective, then this is the book for you.

Porcupines and China Dolls tells the story of James Nathan, a band employee for the (fictional) Blue People of the Northwest Territories. James is a residential school survivor, as is his best friend, Jake Noland. Most of the book follows the fortysomething James through his battles with alcoholism, his emotional crises, and his relationships with women. It also describes James's love-hate relationship with his community.

Author Robert Arthur Alexie makes it clear that the dysfunctional behavior of most of the characters in this book stems from the abuse they suffered in residential school. But the author also makes it clear that this dysfunction is often perpetuated by Aboriginal people themselves, specifically, by those who will not take responsibility for their behavior. This brave (and slightly heretical) stance forces the reader to look at the ways in which Aboriginal people deny themselves healing and therefore contribute to their own oppressive circumstances. It also points out that the road to healing is littered with self-doubt, anger, and lots of false starts.

This is an angry book, full of lots of swear words and empty, emotionless sex. But these elements need to be there: these people, like all people who have suffered physical and/or emotional abuse, have an intense fear of intimacy and also suffer from sexual dysfunction.

These fears and problems are Often manifested, as James's behavior shows, in alcoholism, self-hatred, and an inability to form relationships. Porcupines and China Dolls isn't a pretty book, but it is an important one, because it deals with the reality of so many Aboriginal people's lives, a reality that other Aboriginal authors seem reluctant to fully describe.

Alexie, a Gwich'in from Fort McPherson, N.W.T. has worked as a politician and land-claim negotiator. He is not a professional writer.

But he has a fairly sophisticated writing technique that employs hyperbole, repetition, and plain-spoken narrative in a unique blend of traditional storytelling and contemporary literary fiction. He moves easily from a sparse, desolate tone (which he uses to convey the assembly-line uniformity of the residential school) and matter-of-fact essay-style description (which he uses to indicate lives lived by rote, without emotion or attachment) to a fantastic magic realism that contains bits of irony and surrealism. And the dialogue is absolutely spot-on authentic.

Along the way, he makes many important points, among them that Aboriginal communities react well to crisis but can't seem to help people become well enough to avoid the crisis. He also writes that paternalistic governments and residential schools have created a culture of expectation that Aboriginal people must actively unlearn if they wish to truly be self-governing. Most importantly, by using italics to indicate the subtext of many of the characters' conversations, which represents what they are thinking but what they have left unsaid, he makes the point that honest communication is key to creating and maintaining healthy relationships.

There are a few problems with the novel. Alexie introduces too many characters too fast, and doesn't provide enough description to allow readers to keep them apart (and the internal narrative voices of the characters sound alike). He allows too many scenes to end with characters screaming and raging, which pushes the narrative along but doesn't explain the subtext. Some final scenes are a bit forced, the ending ties up too quickly and too simplistically, and James's final push toward recovery feels false and unexplained because it happens too fast and with little indication as to his internal shift in outlook. But these are relatively minor issues givern the importance of the author's ideas and the other successful elements of the novel.

Those who are unwilling to see the extent of the dysfunction in Aboriginal communities will not like this book. But those who are interested in real, raw discourse from the point of view of the walking wounded will benefit from Alexie's attempt to finally, truthfully, tell the whole story, without fluffs and feathers.