“Featherweight”
by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain
from the April 5, 2021 issue of The New Yorker
I don’t know the work of Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, but I’m looking forward to trying it out. Googling him (so please do let me know if there is more information I’m missing), it appears he currently teaches at Stanford after getting his MFA from the University of Iowa, and that he is working on a story collection. I don’t see any information about any other books, though it appears some of his work has appeared in volumes 1 and 2 of Off the Path: An Anthology of 21st Century American Indian and Indigenous Writers, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. In his interview with The New Yorker he says he’s working what he thinks is two novels.
Here is how “Featherweight” begins:
When I first met my love, I had been off my reservation for a little more than a year. I had become acculturated, we’ll say, to university life — and willingly! I wanted to know what larger America was all about. I took on the aspect of a young dog; everything was new to me, I had my nose up everyone’s ass. First there was Lana, then Julie, then . . . a few other names I can’t remember, and then there was Barbara. That should have been the name of a grandmother, but in fact it belonged to a sweet thing who liked to call me her favorite indian toy.
So let’s go get to know HolyWhiteMountain’s work together! Please leave your thoughts below. I look forward to reading them and sharing my own when I have read the story in its entirety.
I liked this story a lot. Witty, sly, funny, snarky in spots. Like his comment on blonde white girls: “hailing from exotic lands like Portland.”
While underneath it roils with a current of bitter anger and hopelessness:
“I knew I could love her, because she was familiarly broken.”
Despite Allie’s intelligence and scholarship, she feels frustrated and lost:
“I fucking hate this, she said. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life talking to white people about indins. Excuse me, I mean the indigenous peoples of North America.”
“No, she said. What’s depressing is learning that there is almost nothing you can do about what you’ve learned.”
“I’m just another white man’s dog, she said. That’s all they want. They’re training me like a pet.
“Someone has to do something, I said.
“It ain’t me, babe, she said.”
Nice cross-cultural reference.
Also some nice literary writing, as here where the weather parallels the freeze in their relationship:
“By the time we we saw each other again winter had increased to a cruel fullness, everything buried and frozen and brittle — by giving a wrong look you could snap a light post in half.”
And this:
“I felt myself caught at the center of a slowly turning black hole, and I knew some part of me would never escape the gravity of my own insufficiency.”
In the last long paragraph he describes Allie’s transition into an ordinary life, letting go of her former ambitions. Then he turns to his own feelings, and here is more sincere sad writing, mourning the difficulty of being the Other living in a White society:
“in this way those homes became my salvation, because it seemed I could, if only for a moment, be someone else.”
I liked this one, too, William. A lot of stuff going on in that snarky, seemingly unserious tone! Their inability to really connect, in different ways, is so well rendered.
This was one of the better stories that I’ve read in the New Yorker in some time. Mr. HolyWhiteMountain’s style is certainly reminiscent of the beats’ stream-of-consciousness (as he attributes his initial literary inspirations from Kerouac in the interview), as well as prose poetry, and the dirty realists. He conjures the visceral nature of young love and heart break, and the wild fury of the college years through a lens comprised of reservation life on one side and the larger anglo-America on the other (the full weight of each’s history seeping through the pores of the prose). I may have to give this one a second read.
I was not a fan of this story. Felt like it was written by an emo kid with a thesaurus. And such typical male bullcrap. “I lived for her cunt” “playing grab-ass”, finally asking if she came and finding out she never had. Figures.
Loved this story. Beautifully written, wise, funny, and deeply compassionate, can’t wait to read more of his work!