BOOKS: LOST HERITAGE

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Are Native Americans new age wise men, alcoholic victims, valiant survivors of a Wild West holocaust (as in Ken Burns' recent PBS saga), just plain folk not much different from the rest of us, casino-owning entrepreneurs, sullen separatists?

Sure. And writers too, of course, drawing what Hemingway used to call juice from all those ill-fitting depictions. One of the better new novelists, Indian or otherwise, is Sherman Alexie (Reservation Blues, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven). His latest, Indian Killer (Atlantic Monthly Press; 420 pages; $22), is a murderous urban legend not calculated to calm anyone's racial unease. Rage builds slowly in the heart of John Smith, a decent but troubled Native American who was taken--stolen, actually--from his 14-year-old Indian mother and adopted by well-meaning whites. Unreconciled to his new life but unable to speak a native language, and not even knowing which tribe his mother belonged to, he lives a solitary existence as a high-steel worker on a skyscraper being built in downtown Seattle. After years of brooding about his lost heritage, he begins to kill whites, whom he picks at random. Eventually he kills himself.

This is sad and eloquently written. It is also ugly. The trouble is not that Smith's fury lacks justification, nor even that all the novel's whites are pompous, silly do-gooders. The white, wannabe-Indian writer and the white, Indian "expert" professor whom Alexie satirizes are fair enough as stereotypes. And fairness, for that matter, is not the first requirement of a protest novel. But Alexie's tale is septic with what clearly seems to be his own unappeasable fury. He ends Smith's story by prophesying that murderous vengeance will not die; the killings will continue. But the world is so oversupplied with justified hatred, righteously inflaming every continent and tribe, that it is hard to respond to Indian Killer with anything more openhearted than, "Right. Understood. Take a number. Get in line."

--By John Skow