“False Star”
by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain
from the March 20, 2023 issue of The New Yorker
It’s great to see Sterling HolyWhiteMountain’s fiction again in The New Yorker. While still young and without (that I can find) a story collection of novel published, he has had several more stories published in places like Guernica and The Paris Review. I’m afraid I am not able to comment much more as I still have not read anything other than “Featherweight” when it was published in 2021. I thought it was excellent, and I’m glad to have another to read this week.
Here is how “False Star” begins:
As we know, there is a long and storied history of a certain kind of dealing on the part of Uncle Sam with his indians, and so there have also been times when America wakes up after a long weekend of terror only to rediscover its morals and decide a renewed effort is in order, and though I would not go so far as to say these efforts have been particularly . . . genuine . . . what did come from one such gesture was this thing people in my part of indian country—which is, indisputably, the best and most beautiful part, the Blackfeet Reservation—called a claim check, which in the end was money you might get when you turned eighteen. The check came from a land claim, settled with the Feds decades before I was born. As far back as I could remember, I had heard discussion of claim checks. There was something elemental about it: the talk circled round in a seasonal way. People joked about being claim-check rich and then later laughed about being claim-check broke. They bought claim-check cars, got claim-check drunk, and some got claim-check married. That’s how it was for us for a long time, until the money ran out. The Feds are never more careful with limits and end dates on their moral awakenings than they are with us, such is the concern that we might steal the whole country right out from under them. Then we were back to where we were before, a bunch of broke skins way out on the Northern Plains, teasing one another. So this is a story about how I got my part of the money, how I spent it, and the people in my life at that time, such as Big Man, who raised me, and of course June, who I loved before any other, and who has been gone now longer than any of us had the chance to know her when she was alive.
Please share your thoughts below, and I hope you’re having a good start to a new week.
I haven’t read this author’s earlier New Yorker fiction (or work published elsewhere) and there’s enough in this one to make me push ahead, but I was also disappointed because this text has gotten a lot of plaudits out in the lit sphere and I was hoping it’d have a bit more impact, craft, and/or innovation. It does feel like part of a larger bildungsroman novel, which apparently it is.
Starting with “we”s and “us”s is an immediate warning sign as fiction tends to work best with specifics and particulars. The bank full of white people as the protagonist gets his first ATM card was a bit predictable. The masturbation scene with its run-ons and modernistic flair was a little too try-hard. The dogs that grow up around cats, as noted by the teen love interest, June, read as faux profundity. And overall the whole thing felt rather too wistful and nostalgic, going for that air of “back when kids turned a certain age and wanted an automobile instead of the newest iPhone.” At one point this is over-described with a spiel about “Here’s what having a car means where I’m from” and a literal reference to the Great American Dream.
I felt myself thinking this sort of narrative could be encapsulated more effectively in a 3-minute folk song (say, “Used Cars” off Springsteen’s Nebraska or some modern equivalent; I don’t know, Craig Finn, I suppose).
Here’s an example of where Sterling comes up a bit short for me: “June had her long legs crossed and her long hair was pushed back behind one ear and it fell over her shoulder like a broad stroke of black paint and she appeared the way she very often did at that time–bored, insolent, impatient… Someone was always looking at June. She could brush them off as easily as the morning shakes off the night.” The two similes just aren’t effective or original (and morning doesn’t “shake off” anything, and “brush them off” is pretty clichéd and why the unnecessary adverb “easily”; do some women brush off male-gazey attention but only with great difficulty?). The repetition of “long” feels repetitive, not purposeful. The adjective stacking of bored/insolent/impatient that attempts to inscribe her “personality” is crutch-like.
All that said, the lack of incident or contrived drama, its aversion to cheap pathos, its willingness to bend away from “conflict” and “tension”; these are redeeming qualities. The rural west, the Montana setting, the Blackfeet aspects, the ruminative quality of Little Man, these components were fresh. I’m sure to some it will read like Native American Carver or Native American Barry Hannah–stripped down and straightforward and all that good stuff. He’s Stanford-approved and publishing in The New Yorker, and I will admit it’s nice to see a tonic to the anti-masculinity trend of the moment, although one that might also be a bit of a watered-down cocktail that permits “right-thinking” urban bobos a chance to stoke their Sherman Alexie jones without having to feel “conflicted” about it. I’m willing to dip in and give the writer another try, but as regards this particular story I don’t get all the fuss.
Sterling sure knows how to handle the language. Some very nice descriptions and solid run-on sentences.
We all read for different things. I am an emotional reader. Although like Sean I can parse the tropes and fissures, unlike him, I thought this story a success. I found connection where I did not expect to find any. Here I found a coming-of-age ritual in a carefully delineated community I did not know, a community where political will, history and family relationships mattered as much to the protagonist as they do and did in my life, and to me. I felt exhilarated when the narrator did, and nostalgic at the tragedy implied in the distance covered since the events happened. The story worked for me, engaged me, made me feel. Strange sidebar: Although “Love Medicine” takes place on an Ojibwa reservation and not among the Blackfeet, I couldn’t stop believing that June and her red convertible were not in the writer’s mind.