"War Dances," Sherman Alexie

You know you shouldn’t have done it.

It wasn’t a good idea, but you couldn’t help yourself. Why do basically intelligent people do really destructive things?

This is the question underlying Sherman Alexie’s War Dances, a series of short stories and free verse. It’s the same question that Alexie has wrestled with throughout his career, most often with dark-edged humor. Here, however, there’s little humor and a lot of darkness.

In the title story, an old man lies dying in the hospital of diabetes and alcoholism — “natural causes for an Indian.” Alexie likes to veer from poignancy to humor like that. Later in the same story, he alternates ruminations on his own mortality with his brother-in-law’s claim that he can “shop the shit out of Trader Joe’s.”

The title character in “The Senator’s Son” ponders the collapse of his father’s career: “If it is true that children pay for the sins of their fathers, is it also true that fathers pay for the sins of their children?” When the son, out for an evening with friends, assaults two gay men, he worries that his father’s power may not be enough to fix what father and son have done.

And a man who can’t get enough of beautiful women can’t forget a stranger in “The Ballad of Paul Nonetheless.” The stranger was a looker, but everyone agrees that Paul’s wife is the most beautiful woman in the world. The trouble is, Paul is no longer attracted to her, and he can’t tell her why.

War Dances offers some emotional highs and some lows, but it doesn’t offer any satisfying endings. Alexie’s blend of stories and poems just made me feel sad and unfulfilled.

I truly didn’t like, nor did I feel particularly sympathetic to, most of the characters in Alexie’s stories. The free-form verses, with a few exceptions, seemed pretty arcane. And most of the stories just… ended, as if there were no more words available to tell.

It’s as if Sherman Alexie, Indian storyteller, is reacting against the storytelling tradition of moralistic, resolved fables. The mixed moods of his stories could end, emotionally, anywhere.