A review of To Save the Man by John Sayles.
This deeply researched novel juxtaposes life at the Carlisle Indian Boarding School in the late 19th century with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. In this juxtaposition lies the book's great work of imagination, allowing the reader to experience what Wounded Knee meant to some of the students at the school as well as to the reformers who ran the school. At the same time, it illuminates the motivations and effects of the school's program of forced assimilation, the unabashed goal of which was "to save the man" by killing the Indian within him.
I greatly appreciated the depth and breadth of Sayles's research. For the first time, I began to understand the good intentions that so successfully masked the cruelty and arrogance of the various reformers who founded and promoted the Indian boarding schools of the 19th and 20th century. I also appreciated Sayles's respect for Native cultures and his refusal to make his Native characters archetypes or stock characters. As a reader, I understood them as individuals with different levels of Native experience and White exposure and education, and never did I feel compelled to see them as composites or representatives of their tribes.
Because there are so many characters in this novel from so many backgrounds—a feature of the Carlisle School in that it had students from all across the continent—the narrative momentum was diluted. Many interesting things happened, but not everything was of interest to me, and without the less-than-interesting events forming a forward-moving narrative thrust, the pacing seemed to lag. The description of life at the school often felt ethnographic—recording the culture of the Carlisle School in its enforced uniformity that overlaid the great diversity of its students. I appreciate that in many ways, but I also got impatient with it when I wanted the story to move forward.
Sayles wanted to make this story into a movie, and I wanted to read the book in part because I admire his movies so much—he is one of my favorite film directors. I could see much of the ethnographic nature of the book made into the kind of slice-of-life scenes that Sayles does so very well. He uses cinematic techniques in much of the book, most noticeably quick cuts between scenes and characters that sometimes even interrupt dialogue—something that is highly effective in movies but a bit jarring in a book, at least until you get used to it. It did help to propel the book forward through a great deal of character development without complicating the plot further, which ultimately enhanced my reading of the book.
I also wanted to read To Save the Man because I'm very interested in the history of Native America, wherein the boarding schools and the Wounded Knee massacre both loom large. Despite my impatience with the novel's slow narrative development, I enjoyed reading it and greatly appreciate the insight I gained into the origins of the Indian boarding schools and the additional perspective on Wounded Knee. I was trained as a historian before I became a fiction writer, and I'm always aware that even the most deeply researched novels are not works of history. However, good historical fiction can give you the feeling of being in a distant time and place in ways that are otherwise inaccessible. John Sayles does that very well in To Save the Man, which gave me greater empathy for and understanding of the people who were caught up in that history.
Thank you to NetGalley and Melville House for providing access to an advance copy.