27 November, 2001: The Miss Hobbema Pageant
It's always tricky to write from a point of view with a significantly different identity than your own. W. P. Kinsella gives it a whirl in The Miss Hobbema Pageant, a collection of short stories about the lives of a group of Cree living in Alberta. The stories center around their putative author, Cree writer Silas Ermineskin, and his best friend, cut-up and ladies' man Frank Fencepost. Sadly, the stories largely lack the emotional heft of those that seem the most obvious comparison, the stories in Sherman Alexie's magnificent collection Tonto and the Lone Ranger Fistfight in Heaven. Alexie's protagonists seem to know in their hearts that no matter what good intentions they and those around them possess, they're doomed to end their lives right back on the reservation, drinking themselves to death and talking smack about old basketball games; this knowledge simultaneously seems to provide them with a damn-the-torpedoes liberty. (It's not at all clear to me that this difference is due solely to the fact that Alexie is a Spokane, or even that he grew up on a reservation.) Without that relentless gravity at the core, Kinsella's stories drift into Small Town Wackiness reminiscent of a decent sitcom. The two best stories are at the extremes -- the closest to Alexie's inexorably fixed universe features an outwardly successful Cree whose attempt to find his Indian identity drives him to bury himself in the earth; the most distant is a tale of slowly escalating practical jokes whose comic payoff doesn't rely at all on the ethnicity (and relies very much on the identity) of the characters. Still, though Kinsella can be a great author -- I loved "Red Wolf, Red Wolf" and The Iowa Baseball Confederacy -- the Ermineskin stories don't seem up to snuff.