Books

The Insufficiency of Maps
By Nora Pierce, Atria, 2007, 224 pp.

Sometimes, where you come from and where you're going in life are the same place. But if you don't know the first, can you ever reach the second?

This question is at the heart of Nora Pierce's debut novel, The Insufficiency of Maps, which explores the childhood of a young Native American girl struggling to find a place where she fits.

Through vivid imagery and the innocent eyes of a child, the reader sees Alice's life as a whirlwind, blowing her from home to home.

Her schizophrenic, alcoholic mother, “Mami,” moves five-year-old Alice from the city to a reservation, where they live in a cramped trailer with Alice's “Papi.” They later hitchhike to live with Alice's grampa.

When her grandfather moves into a nursing home, the little girl must attempt to play the role of mother. Alice makes ketchup and mustard sandwiches out of what little bread is left in the home as Mami barricades herself and Alice in the living room to try to escape from the voices she hears.

Eventually, Mami relinquishes Alice to foster care and resigns herself to a hospital. A teenage Alice must cope with being a foster child in a well-to-do white family, and when they send her to bead-crafting classes on a reservation to help her find her roots, the magic there is gone for her.

Pierce's story highlights the struggles of a people to maintain their cultural identity amid a changing society, presenting the reader with an almost constant juxtaposition of the old and the new — the tribal traditions, dances and mystical stories that comprise the “old ways” versus the present reality of filthy trailers, mooching relatives, cigarettes and alcohol.

Old natives such as Tia Jimenez, whose wrinkled skin is covered in shawls and traditional clothing as she seems to become part of the dirt and mountains themselves, contrast with the hippie-like members of the American Indian Movement, who guzzle beer, smoke pot and talk of taking their land back, with interest, from the government.

The stories Mami — in her moments of sanity — told young Alice of a condor sweeping a young girl away serve as a refuge to which Alice's mind returns in challenging moments.

An innocence and subtlety pervade Pierce's storytelling, with sensory details that evoke award-winning novelist Michael Ondaatje's descriptions of childhood in the Sri Lankan jungle in his memoir. Every character Alice comes into contact with is real; the reader can see, smell, touch the world around her.

For example, in describing a woman the reader deduces to be from social services, narrator Alice notes, “I have seen this woman before, I know how she walks, and what she carries in her suede briefcase: lollipops, all orange-flavored and wrapped in sticky plastic. … Now I see that her eyes are the color of weak tea, as if they were not steeped long enough and her pale blond hair does not move at all in the hot winds.”

Pierce weaves a beautiful story of the search for identity, of finding your way when you don't know where you're going and, indeed, the insufficiency of maps in getting there.

Lindsay Maples is a graduate of the University of Alabama. She lives in Mobile and works as a copy editor at the Mobile Press-Register.