Ramblings after finishing Almanac of the Dead

After finishing Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, I realized a bizarre fact, that Leslie Marmon Silko is the anti-Walt Disney. Now, this isn’t because Disney movies tend to be overly exuberant and happy, but instead, Silko has a tendency to kill off the major characters that are male in the novel, but allow the equally despicable female characters to suffer, yet survive. I found this tendency to be bizarre. If I were the novelist, I would try to save the good characters, not the villainous ones. While characters like Seese’s baby boy, Monte, and Menardo’s wife, Iliana, may have died tragic deaths, these characters aren’t nearly as despicable and screwed up as Menardo, Alegria, and the Blue family.
Menardo’s naïveté really shocked me. He becomes so obsessed with the fact that he is bulletproof it is almost like a little kid with a Superman fantasy who believes he can fly. Menardo is so sure that he cannot be hurt that he tells his driver Tacho to shoot him so that people would know that he is bullet proof. Ironically, his vest was manufactured incorrectly, and the bullet kills him. Max Blue also dies by being struck by lightning. Silko punishes the characters she creates to show the hand of G-d and to create some semblance of a moral structure. Only Alegria shows some signs of change of heart and intelligence. When she is stranded in the Mexican desert, her relentless personality really shines bright. While she is still a greedy witch, because as she almost loses consciousness, she says “‘Oh my little beauties! I love you, I love you; I owe you my life’”(687). Her “little beauties” refer to the jewels and safety deposit box numbers that she leeched off of Menardo.
I guess that what really annoys me about her character is that even after a life and death situation, she still only cares about money. I realize that money is a facet of life, but it isn’t the only thing. There should be some sort of human connection and I feel that Silko only creates a dynamic where there is a sexual connection. All the characters stories focus around bizarre sexual excursions, including one gay romance with a college student who becomes an undercover cop, and another involving a paralyzed business focused man who has orgasms in his mind. These bizarre interactions portray human connections as only good for using people and not for any emotional connection. Of course, the one human connection that seems to be pure is that of Seese’s love for her son Monte. However, Silko sours this relationship because Seese is a cocaine addict and Monte is kidnapped and killed. So while Seese cannot believe that her baby is dead, the human emotional connection, in essence love, is destroyed.
However, I found that in this example of Silko’s writing, other than Sterling, she presents most of the male characters as without feeling and hope. Sterling was one of the few characters that I felt comes to terms with himself. While Seese eventually realizes, or at least the reader does, that her baby dies, she doesn’t really show growth, she just wallows in grief at the end of the novel. Sterling, however comes to a realization about his situation. When he returns to the tribal land he is at peace with being an outsider. Silko writes, “Sterling didn’t look like his old self,” (762-63) because he is a changed man and has accepted fate. I feel that he truly changes whereas other characters don’t.
I feel like this novel really separates the white American from the society in the novel. As a white reader, this is a rather unusual experience. I almost felt that this was some distant past or some totally imagined future. At times, it seems like this can’t be the present. Very little relates to life in the northeast, and I can’t really picture being in Mexico or living that life.
Another little thing that bothered me about the novel was how briefly all the characters actually came together. I was expecting some large chaotic collision of every character, but it seemed by the time most of the characters met, a lot of them were already dead. While the chaos of the multiple uprisings was intriguing, I was expecting something more for the conclusion of a seven hundred-page tome filled with what could be seen as individual stories that didn’t need to go together.
In class we discussed how this novel isn’t science fiction, yet it is a parallel version of our own earth in our own time. It took me a while, but I with the novels end I finally understand how Almanac of the Dead is a dystopian novel set in the present. With the uprising of the masses and the idea of communist and homeless factions moving northward to America, the novel is eerily similar to that of Children of Men and other dystopian novels. While I don’t think that the homeless could really be organized into a Vietnam Veterans Army the idea is quite frightening and also quite sad. I would like to believe that our government is working toward an end to the homeless, even in these tough economic times. Sterling in the end of the novel hints that snake is looking south and that the people will be on the move north (763). This means that the forces of destruction are imminent and that we will not be able to stop it.