Reviewed by Adam Goldwyn
7.3.07

Norah Pierce’s The Insufficiency of Maps opens with the sentence: “Our beginning, as far back as I can remember, my hand in hers.” Like the best opening lines, this subtly haunting line stayed with me as I read the entire novel, hovering in the background of every ensuing sentence. What, I wondered, would make an author begin a novel with a sentence fragment? And what would make an author begin with only the slightest variation of the Biblical “In the beginning”? As I progressed through the novel, the answers became clear, and the first sentence became as meaningful as it was enigmatic.

The novel, like its opening sentence, is not complete; it’s but a fragment of a life, a small window that offers only a small glimpse of the world. And, like the Bible, its characters are a carefully balanced mix of unique individuals who, paradoxically, also serve as archetypes of a much larger society. The Insufficiency of Maps narrates a fragment of the early life of Alice Black, its narrator and protagonist, an adolescent Native American girl struggling to find her way in contemporary America, and the lives of the Native Americans around her: her mother, father, grandfather and assorted friends and acquaintances. In telling their story, The Insufficiency of Maps tells, in miniature, the story of their entire people.

Early in the novel, Alice meets Inez, an already wizened twenty-something Native American woman, who tells the innocent young Alice: “People say us Indians ain’t supposed to get wanderlust… We’re supposed to love the land we’ve lived on all these thousands of years, and blah, blah, blah, but don’t seem to me like we have anything here, not anything we could really call ours. Everyone’s all mixed up now, anyhow.” Inez voices the novel’s, and contemporary Native American society’s, defining conflict: the relationship between the past and the present, tradition and modernity, the reservation and the rest of the world.

This concern is the central conflict, not only for Native American culture as a whole, but for each of its individual members, and again it is Inez who voices this cultural conflict on a personal level: “The problem with me,” she tells Alice, “is I don’t just want it all back… I want it all back with interest. I want the old ways and the new ways, too… Even on the reservation, next to all my old uncles and aunties, on the same land where the Shinnecock were born, I just felt like a leftover, like a ghost.” In the world Pierce has created, rootlessness is the existential plight of her characters, and, it seems, of the contemporary Native American.

This existential crisis is exacerbated by poverty, alcoholism and racism. When Alice goes to a school in a white suburb, for example, she encounters a racism based not in hostility (though she will find that too), but a racism based in ignorance. Her white teacher asks her: “What can you tell us about Indians…What are some of your traditional foods?” Alice has no response, but Pierce allows us insight into what she is thinking: “At the Warrick’s, we eat pancakes and frozen dinners, sometimes baked ham and cake after church with bright green peas and neon-colored Kool-Aid.” This is ironic because the white teacher has absolutely no clue about Native American culture, and does not realize that the Native American diet is not all that different from the white diet. But the even more potent and tragic irony in this scene is that Alice herself has no more knowledge about her cultural identity than her ignorant teacher. She is acutely aware that being Native American profoundly affects almost every aspect of her everyday life, but she does not know how or why.

At the core of The Insufficiency of Maps is Alice’s coming of age story. As such, it is first and foremost the story of her relationships—especially with her mother. To return to the first sentence, Alice tells us that “as far back as I can remember, my hand in hers.” Indeed, Alice’s most intimate struggle, and the one around which the larger conflicts of the novel revolve, is Alice’s attempts to cope with having a mother who is a poverty- stricken alcoholic schizophrenic, a mother whom she loves, but finds time and time again cannot love her in return, and cannot even be counted to provide the bare necessities of survival for a girl too young to protect herself. The novel begins optimistically, with Alice and her mother, whom she calls Mami, returning to Papi’s trailer on the reservation. Despite this promise of a better life, her mother’s mental deterioration begins to erode whatever stability, happiness and comfort the little family may have had. The novel plots Mami’s self-destructive downward spiral from the point of view of the young, devoted girl she takes with her, holding her hand as tightly as she can.

Such is Alice’s naiveté (and Pierce’s skill in portraying it) that she sees nothing strange or unusual about her mother’s behavior, and, since the reader knows nothing but what Alice tells us, we do not either—at first. It is only as she grows, as she slowly moves from innocence to experience, that she realizes, and the reader along with her, just how brutal her world is. Pierce’s achievement is in plotting this progression, along with its attendant psychological and emotional insight, to create a story at once intensely personal, but also universal, not just to the Native Americans it depicts, but to anyone who ever grew up in adversity.