To Save the Man

By John Sayles

Melville House 2025

The title of To Save the Man, the new novel from actor/director/screenwriter/novelist John Sayles, comes from the noxious motto of Captain Richard Henry Pratt, commandant of Pennsylvania’s infamous Carlisle School: “To save the man, we must kill the Indian,” the guiding ethos of Carlisle being the “Civilizing of the Red Man,” the forcing of “blanket” Native Americans to cut their hair, adopt Western dress (and Western Christianity, of course), and abandon their own names and languages. To Save the Man is historical fiction set at the Carlisle School in 1890, following a handful of characters as they contrast the cultural brutalities of this one-size-fits-all Indian Bureau policy with the rumors reaching the school of the desperate cultural revival movement called the Ghost Dance that’s sweeping through the American West led by a mysterious messiah-figure named Wovoka. The Indian students aren’t the only ones feeling the odd tension between the regimentation of their world and the dangerous abandon of the Ghost Dance.

A reader wary of 21st-century grievance-politics deadfalls might look at such a premise with justifiable caution and maybe a little consideration. The premise looks like a standard bit of sanctimonious critic-proofing: “Oh, you don’t like my novel about a gay man in the 1950s facing oppression? Maybe that means – and maybe I’ll claim on social media, that you sympathize with that oppression, that you’re a bigot, that maybe you should be fired from your job, etc., etc.” Surely, such a reader might hope, Sayles is too seasoned and secure to position a novel on such manipulative practices?

One of the book’s core cast of characters is Lady Redbird, an instructor at Carlisle who’s conflicted about how that position conflicts with her own heritage. “She’ll be teaching music, speaking in English even with the ones who know Lakota,” she thinks. “A more familiar face, she hopes, an ally, giving them something instead of taking something away … But already she feels like a traitor.”

It’s Lady Redbird who reflects on her initial exposure to white people:

When she first encountered them, Miss Redbird thought white people something special, something above the natural order. They knew things, could do things, had things that nobody else did. She now knows they are only members of the tribe of two-legged human beings, no more different from other mortals than any one of the ivory keys on this piano, white or black, is from the next.

But if that’s her conclusion, he’s in the wrong novel: in To Save the Man, white people aren’t the same as black or red people, they’re universally not only worse but loathsome. Given the setting and the open ethnic cleansing pursued at Carlisle, maybe that’s unavoidable, but that doesn’t mean the Native characters should all be quite as perfect as they are here. Although some of those characters, especially a young Chippewa man named Antoine LeMare and a Sioux boy named Makes-Trouble-in-Front, whose name is quickly shortened to Trouble, and who’ll certainly be the choice role in a movie adaptation of the book, are very well-drawn.

That adaptation perhaps isn’t as far-fetched as it might at first seem, since Sayles mentions in his Acknowledgments that To Save the Man began its life as screenplay (and this is very obvious in the reading, since Sayles insists on italicizing only parts of words, as though he were just offstage, micro-managing Booboo Stewart as Trouble. Words in English come pre-installed with stressed and unstressed syllables; Sayles blew his whole italics budget for nothing.

As mentioned, the novel doesn’t escape being heavy-handed and doesn’t even really want to. Sayles works in hammy turns of phrase from dime-Westerns (“reckoning in lead” and the like), but too much of the book is just the kind of rote sloganeering that would be called “virtue signaling” if it were coming from a less patently sincere source. That signature hair-cutting, featured on the book’s US cover in actual samples of the promotional photos the Carlisle School used to mail to Boston and Philadelphia, gets just this kind of treatment:

Leslie has the Apaches stand where they are until he has copied the names pinned on their backs to a sheet of paper, making circles to indicate the order of their heads from left to right, girls in the front row. Most will be getting new names, the old ones corralled between parentheses on the before-and-after postcards the school sends out. Ga-yar-lay becomes William Black, with short hair parted down the middle and a brighter if not happier countenance.

“You lead the boys over for their haircuts,” says Mr. Choate when Leslie has all the names recorded. “We don’t want anybody wandering off the reservation.”

Since To Save the Man relies for its narrative impacts almost exclusively on weighted line-readings it hasn’t yet been adapted to have, there isn’t much left here other than moral indignation, and since every reader presumably knows that the Carlisle School and all the institutions like it were moral abominations, even the indignation feels a little redundant. It’s a bit ironic that, dramatically speaking anyway, more of the Ghost Dance might have saved the book.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News