I began reading this group of essays first back in June, finished them in October after reading most of the novels it references, and then I read the whole book again over the last weekend. This is a complicated and open-ended and exploratory book and I recommend you read it because what I got from it might be completely different from what you get from it...in the tradition, I suppose, of all deep reading.

"Native American Fiction: A User's Manual" is a remarkable work for the way it isolates, through deep reading of a handful of novels, how contemporary Native American novels reflect and refract the heritage of colonialism, the heritage of genocide, the heritage of mystic nostalgia-building about Native American life...and the heritage of past writings about Native Americans, from colonialists and Native Americans alike. The book is among other things a close examination of the idea of "authenticity" in Native American works. The book tries to define what 'authenticity' really means, not by what critics and/or authors say, but from inside the text, from what can be gleaned from the novels themselves.

Treuer argues that writing that evokes 'authenticity,' when examined at a text-level, has less to do with getting back to a pure and pre-colonial storytelling tradition, and more to do with writing sentences that mimic 17th-19th century white authors, like Cooper and Grinnell and Longfellow. He posits that the language of the colonizer mimics to the language of "authentic" voices, and vice versa, to the point where however great a contemporary Native American novel is, it can't be distinguished at a textual level from a novel written by a non-Native-American.

Treuer carries this argument to the last possible iterative conclusion near the end of the book when he compares at a textual level the work of Sherman Alexie, champion of the idea of authenticity as an important bedrock of Native American fiction, with the work of racist charlatan Asa Earl Carter, author of the sham autobiography "Education of Little Tree." Treuer finds little to differentiate the works of these two authors that can be found within the works themselves. This is a bit mind-blowing and that is why it's important to read the whole book...there's a reason why this essay is near the end of a very carefully laid-out argument.

There is so much here to make you feel either aghast or enlightened or both at once because Treuer really does blow up a lot of cherished beliefs in his quest for absolute honesty--his desire to clear the mist and romance away from our collective idea of Indian-ness. Treuer is a huge fan of Erdrich and Welch and Silko but he is also happy to point out that Erdrich's work--how her novels work--has more in common with Proust and Faulkner than with 'authenticity..' and that Welch's elevated dialogue is influenced by Cooper, and that Welch uses techniques that hearken all the way back to Homer...and Silko's mythologies are not 'authentic' but are instead made anew to suit her fictional purpose...All the while he is asserting these authors mastery and genius. This is not a take-down. It's a build-up.

So in the end when Treuer states "There is no such thing as Native American Fiction," what he is saying is, I believe, that we readers need to pull back the easy assertions of 'authenticity' and to read with fresh eyes and without expectation that we know what the term 'Native American fiction' really means. Because 'authenticity' is only, Treuer seems to say, an obscurity of what is really going on in these novels. To claim 'authenticity' is in a way to diminish their novel-ness, their nouvelle-ness, their innovative greatness.

One of my favorite passages of this book is a close read of an Objibwe poem and its English translations. Within that fragment of original, 'authentic' literature is such a pure beauty, even if the fragment was meant as a children's rhyme. Treuer doesn't quite say that the only true authentic Native American literature is limited to pre-colonial periods, or to works written originally in Native American languages. But he allows for what has been lost.

A fascinating read, with its core thesis challenged in interesting ways by the author himself on every page, in a way that allows the reader to spin and speculate about literature in wonderful ways. It is in the end a book for readers, giving us new ways to approach and appreciate these novels as readers.

Old review:

More a journey than a thesis, Treuer's Native American Fiction: A User's Manual gave me, as a reader, new perspectives, rather than hard conclusions. Treuer posits motivations of fellow Native American authors and why they write what they do; these are always interesting. He also shares his assumptions about what (mostly white) readers bring to a novel written by a Native American. His suppositions are made declaratively, not self-reflectively. I loved his certainty. I loved his opinions. I re-thought my own reading experiences of the novels he writes about and came to new understandings of these. I was mostly persuaded. And I enjoyed spending time with Treuer, as he explored a topic that he has thought about deeply. This is the best kind of literary criticism--a kind that opens both worlds and words to new interpretations. ( )