BILDUNGSROMAN? KUENSTLERROMAN?

It’s hard to know what the reception of the Nasdijj trilogy might have been in a different time or place. The three books are not alike, except that they were all passed through the persona of “Nasdijj,” the nom de plume of Timothy Barrus. The first is a collection of essays, the second is Barrus’ kernel story of two males in intimacy (one dying), and the third is a bildungsroman, a story of growing up and struggling against society. Or maybe a kuenstlerroman, which is the same thing only about an artist. It is also once again Barrus’ kernel story, except about two young brothers.

I’m in a position now, knowing a bit about Tim, to say, “Oh, he got this idea from the time in his life when . . .” or “this person is really that person from his real life, but mixed in with another.” But I’m also QUITE aware that that’s not the useful or meaningful thing to do. Nasdijj was a mythical character marketed as part of the Native American corporate literature soup, but that’s not what counts. Then he was recycled into a part of the Great Cynical Hoax soup, which he was not. And now it would be easy to “do him” again as part of the True Confession soup, trying to get at his “real” life.

But this time I reread “Geronimo’s Bones” with things like Jung’s Red Book in mind.

There are two things I was sharply aware of and neither of them was the fact that Tim’s shoulders are being replaced at the moment. One was that when Alexie and Fleischer attacked Tim by ransacking his background for people who would tell them terrible things, they were careless of the effect of their revelations on the people around Tim, some of whom were shade dwellers and night dwellers who were hurt very much. Yet no one has really turned a retributive spotlight on Alexie and Fleischer, who might not be able to withstand much scrutiny of their own motives and methods.

The other is how much “Indian” is code for a certain class, just as porn and sado-machochism are also code for a certain class. In the case of the former, “Indian” has come to mean (except around reservations) a kind of idealized person beyond reproach, sort of like the characters in Ruth Beebe Hill’s “Hanta Yo” or Asa Earl Carter’s “Education of Little Tree.” Guilt, pity and admiration form a shield that is also a screen around Indians, one that some Indians depend upon. If you say “porn,” then that’s enough of a crime to justify any attack. It’s worse than perpetrating a Ponzi scheme that pitches old people and nonprofits into suffering and destruction.

Yet Indians are everywhere and mostly like the rest of us. As someone remarked, any family that has a history in America that goes more than a few generations back has undoubtedly got Indians in it somewhere. And sado/masochistic dynamics, pornographic representations, are so common we barely notice them. Diluted, sure, but the top/bottom dynamics of social struggle and personal relationship are inescapable.

Geronimo is the hero of the main character “hero” whom the naive reader assumes is the writer, since the book is written in first person. (They were absent the day the English teacher explained the literary technique of the “unreliable narrator.”) This time the actual narrator, Barrus, is fictionalizing himself in many ways, but also the actual narrator, Barrus, was recovering from double hip replacement and under the influence of strong drugs. His father died in 2003. This book is an expansion of an essay in the first book, “The Blood Runs Like a River Through Our Dreams,” (2000) about a demon father, a man who is everywhere on the American frontier. Even on television every night. Fleischer didn’t think such men ever lived in suburbia.

Fleischer took 1950 Michigan to be like his own well-heeled, recent, Eastern, white suburban past. He knows nothing about industrial towns who just happen to have a university and how the undeveloped second growth and farms came right up to the city, even into it. He knows nothing about working class men, recently rural, lacking college educations but determined to come up in the world, which is certainly what their wives intend. He does not know how the north timber country can be like the frontier West, how full of Indians it remains, nor does he know anything about how those working class men, so recently dependent on hunting for a winter’s meat, define themselves in their hunting and fishing. He doesn’t know about how they use ingenuity and force to survive through boom and bust and how they do it all for their children on the one hand, but how they feel they own their children on the other.

Sort of the way publishers feel they “own” their writers and treat them that way, even on the scale of the local newspaper. The book section editor of Tim’s paper was very offended that when he tried to call Tim about the Nasdijj furor, Tim didn’t call back. Evidently no one told him Tim was fighting for his life in a borrowed cabin while he kicked the drugs necessary for his hip surgery. A man wants obedience! A man demands a response! It validates his worth in the world!

At the end of the 20th century, which was also the end of a millennium, repeated hurricanes were responsible for fungus pneumonia that nearly snuffed Tim. He was saved with massive doses of prednisone which caused avascular necrosis. Simultaneously, a story he wrote was accepted by Esquire magazine. This went well enough that in 2000 he was offered a contract by Houghton Mifflin, which he fulfilled with the same essays he’d been writing for years, except that now they were hailed as brilliant. Sherman Alexie despised them and labeled them “fake” but at that point no one paid attention.

Tim broke with Houghton Mifflin but was offered a contract from Ballantine for two more “Nasdijj” books, one in 2003 and one in 2004. “Geronimo’s Bones” is the last Nasdijj book. In 2006 Fleischner put together a negative version of information people had known all along and found two or three haters willing to be quoted, not counting Sherman who was still in a huff that Barrus won the PEN Beyond Margins Award that he’d been counting on. In essence, Fleischner targeted Barrus without knowing him, to ingratiate himself with Alexie, who didn’t know Barrus either. None of the people quoted really knew Barrus. People who knew him protected him.

But if one forgets all that, and looks at the book as a book, the experience is quite different. This is my third reading. I HATE reading it, because it’s full of abuse. And yet one can’t really describe the overcoming of abuse without describing what one is escaping. I know people to whom these things have happened. Barrus is not making up things that never happen. What is important is that in the end, the boys DO grow up, they escape their tormentor, and it is clear that small generosities and big braveries have made it possible.

So what kind of “roman” is that? I don’t know German well enough to suggest a name for this kind of story, layered with both truth and myth, torment and love. Joe Campbell could have told me.