Customer Reviews

Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

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1 star:		(4)

 

 

I should preface this book with a personal explanation. The best way to approach Sherman Alexie is to look into your own personal history regarding American Indians. For me, I grew up with the vague notion that Indians didn't exist anymore. I think a lot of kids that don't live near large Native American populations suffer from this perception. I mean, where in popular culture do you ever come across a modern day Indian? There was that movie "Smoke Signals" (based on one of the stories in this book) and possibly the television show "Northern Exposure" but that is it, ladies and gentlemen. In my own life, realization hit when I started Junior High and read "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" for the very first time. If you've read the book then you know that it dwells on the character "Chief" and his past. I read about him and found out that I knew diddly over squat about Native Americans. They show "Dances With Wolves" in high school homeroom and through that you're supposed to infer contemporary Indian culture? That's like watching "Gone With the Wind" and wondering where all the happy slaves are today. It doesn't make sense. This is why I'm nominating, "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight In Heaven" as the book that should be required in every Junior High and High School in the country immediately. We've all read our "Catcher In the Rye" and "Scarlet Letter". Now let's read something real.

The book is a collection of short stories, all containing repeating characters and events. There is no single plot to the story and while the character of Victor is probably the closest thing the book has to a protagonist, he hardly hogs the spotlight for very long. In this book we witness a single Spokane Reservation. We watch personal triumphs and repeated failures and mistakes. Author Alexie draws on history, tradition, and contemporary realism to convey the current state of the American Indian. You'll learn more than you thought to.

My favorite chapter in this book, bar none, is "A Good Story". In it, a character's mother mentions that her son's stories are always kind of depressing. By this point the reader is more than halfway through the book and has probably thought the same thing (deny it though they might). In response, Junior tells a story that isn't depressing. Just thoughtful and interesting. It's as if Alexie himself has conceded briefly that, no, the stories in this book aren't of the cheery happy-go-lucky nature the reader might be looking for. That's probably because the stories are desperately real and fantastical all at once. To be honest, I feel a bit inadequate reviewing this book. It's obvious that Alexie is probably the greatest writer of his generation. Hence, these stories are infinitely readable and distressing.

This is a good book. This is the book to read when you ask yourself, "What author haven't I ever read before?". This is the book you will find yourself poring over on subways, buses, and taxi cabs. You'll leave it on park benches and run twenty blocks north to retrieve it again. I don't know how many other ways I can say that it's a good book. Well worth reading. Funny and taxing all at once. Sherman Alexie deserves greater praise than any I can give him. All I can say then is that this book is beautiful. Read this book.

I initially picked this book up for two reasons--I liked Alexie's novel, Indian Killer, and more importantly because I live in Spokane, WA and have traveled extensively through the Reservations and towns that are described in the stories. The descriptions and the characters are very realistic, the names and places are not very fictionalized, and it makes me feel right at home. Fortunately for those readers not privleged to live in the Inland Northwest, the stories also teach a lot about Indian culture, the modern Native American and their heritage. It is a disturbing picture at times with too much alcaholism, violence, and racism, but underneath it all there is a great deal of love which makes the stories comforting and redeeming. Alexie has a lyrical voice, and when combined with his authenticsity, beautiful, rich stories are produced. Aside from those academic traits, he is also very funny, honest, and affectionate throughout, and those qualities are what I will remember about this book far more than the descriptions of familiar hotels on Third Avenue and the basketball games played between Springdale and Wellpinit. It is a great, quick read, and a wonderful way to pass an afternoon.

This is my personal measure of Sherman Alexie, the gifted young Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian writer: He caught my attention in a recently rebroadcast "60 Minutes" feature story. What appealed to me was his sardonic wit--edgy, thoughtful, ironic, challenging, and, yes, I thought, a bit sad. I told myself, Let's see if he can really write, let's see what he's got to say. So I pick up one of his books of prose; within a week, I had read three.

This outstanding collection of interrelated stories was the first. Very, very impressive! I loved his writing, his crisp, bone simple and straight style. I felt for his finely etched characters, a handful of them--especially one named Victor, presumably the author's stand-in--recurring throughout. And these are all stories with bite.

"Maybe hunger informs our lives," says the narrating voice of "Family Portrait." Roughly the first half of this book exposes us to what it means to be "Native American" today: The spoils of defeat--the tight-lipped, self-destructive despair of a once proud, historic people reduced to segregated conditions. Isolated from the white world, isolated from their own traditions. Subject to poor housing, education and food, chronic unemployment, rampant alcoholism, diabetes, blood fights and bloody ends.

Alexie's sharp depictions of conflicted identity, uncertainty in the everyday and lifelong struggles for survival on the Spokane Indian reservation, the contradictory capacities for tenderness and tragedy, beauty and brutality, breaks down our detachment, jars us into realizing both the unique and common human attributes of his people. What he induces is simply called "empathy." As another who grew up in a "reservation"--"the urban ghetto"--I felt that same incoherent rage that plagues so many of his characters. In the commonweal of pain, it was a further demonstration that "you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy." Yeah, okay--"empathy."

At the halfway point, I was ready to start writing this review--no question, Alexie had shown he had the literary goods and I wanted to proclaim it--but something told me, first finish the book. Good thing. Why? Because he tricked me--he still held an ace up his storytelling sleeve.

"Hope feeds among the tombs," Melville wrote. "Always darkest before the daylight," goes the tireless adage we've all heard somewhere from our elders. "That's how I do this life sometimes by making the ordinary just like magic," says the narrator in one of Alexie's stories ("Jesus Christ's Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation"). "Every Indian learns how to be a magician and learns how to misdirect attention and the dark hand is always quicker than the white eye . . . no matter how close you get to my heart you will never find out my secrets and I'll never tell you and I'll never show you the same trick twice."

Might be Alexie begins his sleight of hand with the (deliberately) Kafka-esque tale of the trial of Thomas Builds-the-fire, "misfit storyteller" who can still feel the pulse of tradition within him and stubbornly refuses to disown it. (Hmm. Defiance.) Then there's "A Good Story," about the loving, mutually respectful relationship between an old man and a boy. Or the story about the Indian married couple who reconcile after the wife has left her wise-cracking husband for making one joke too many about his terminal cancer. (Hmm. Redemption!) Or the character arc of Victor--whose name, keep in mind, means "conqueror"--over an array of first and third person narratives, as he struggles against the pull of his parents' drunken, broken marriage; resenting his father's departure; the low expectations of Indian schooling; the high expectations of being a local hero; incipient alcoholism; the fear of and yearning for love. The Alexie magic is in balancing the bitter with the sweet; showing us that in the midst of desolation there is also room for resilience, for humor, for trust--for hope.

It was during this time I happened to see a repeat of Chris Rock's last HBO special, the one where he advises those folks who're always popping off in the media about how bad their people have it now in this country--how they're "losing America"--to just shut up. "Nobody has it worse than the Indians," he says. "They're all dead!"

No, not quite, Chris. Deliberately wounded by long-standing government policy, yes. Demonized and ignored by a "dominant" history, yes. Suffering, yes. But they still survive, human as the rest of us--with faults, foibles, and feelings, nightmares and dreams--and they're championed by one of their own, a writer with a singular voice who tells modern day Indian stories with clarity, style, perception and wit. This book opens a door to consciousness. A highly recommended read.

This is an awesome collection, but when you read it, keep in mind that the stories are not supposed to be connected. Each wonderful story stands on its own and portrays reservation life from the perspective of different characters, although some characters appear peripherally in more than one story. Some may say that Alexie is angry and that this book describes a life of alcoholic depressiveness on the Rez; in reality he is just describing much of what is. There is love and caring and pride and intelligence right next to the stuff one might consider ugly. Reading this book will alternately make you sad and happy--that's what Life is anyway.

And go rent the movie, Smoke Signals; Alexie wrote the screenplay for it based on some of the scenes from this book, but don't expect the book to be like the movie or vice versa. Alexie is a talented young writer who deserves the attention he is getting.

Halfway through this book I emailed the friend that bought it for me to tell him how much I was loving it. I then asked him "How the hell am I supposed to review this?" His reply was to explain that "He needs a new star, a category for 'Holy Sh!t, that one hit me hard.' But they don't make the Holy Sh!t category on Amazon." That pretty much says it all.

The truth is I was blown away by Sherman Alexie somewhere after the first paragraph of the introduction to this book. In the intro he presents himself in a manner that is completely honest and straightforward. He had me laughing from the start, and I can and do appreciate someone who can make fun of themselves. But through his introduction and throughout all the stories in this book, one word ran through my head continuously; brilliant.

I am not going to give any sort of plot summary because it's simply impossible. What I will do is give you the titles to a few of my favorites and if that doesn't entice you to want to read on, nothing will. This book contains 24 short on length but not on content, stories. Each story is unique, yet there is always a sense of familiarity, whether it's the presence of a familiar character, a diet Pepsi, fry bread or a basketball game. Each story is its own theme, place and time, but always about Mr. Alexie's Spokane Indian people and the reservation.

My favorites:
The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire
Jesus Christ's Half-Brother is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation
A Train is an Order of Occurrence
The Approximate Size of my Favorite Tumor

In his introduction he states that these stories contain some truths, but explains it as "reservation realism" and challenges us to figure out what exactly that means. My interpretation is that all these stories contain little threads of truth, some more than others, and with these little threads he weaves and enhances creating a blanket of fantasy and fiction. Whether I am right or wrong, I have to believ each tale is based on some truth, they were just too real to me to be otherwise.

I think I experienced every human emotion while reading this book, and then experienced them all over again. Some stories are horribly sad and gut wrenching, others are lighthearted and funny and mischievous; most are all of the above and then some. The one thing I am left with after reading this book is that Sherman Alexie conveys more in a short 5 page story than most writers manage to say in a full 300 page novel; that's an exquisite gift. I am grateful to my friend, eternally, for gifting me with this book and introducing me to this writer. I can't recommend this book enough, it's a treasure I will read and read and then read some more.

One Stick Song

Cherise Everhard, February 2008

My son sent me this book in the mail and recommended that I read it. He said that he was loving the book and "laughing like a madman." Since I enjoyed the movie, Smoke Signals, which was losely based on the book, I took my son's recommendation. The first thing that struck me about Alexie's writing is that although there is much humor, it is a kind of humor that elicits guilty laughter: the kind that when you do laugh you immediately look around to see if you are being observed. At first I was not sure if this uncomfortableness was because I was a white reader or if Alexie (knowing that he would have a large white audience) was just displaying his anger. And there is a great deal of anger in this book; but there is also a great deal of humanity, and by the end of the book I decided that Alexie is not grinding his ax, only describing a life that he knows in every detail. It is up to the reader to make his own interpretation and his own moral examination.

This is not to imply that the book is not enjoyable. It is eminently readable and Alexie displays a style that combines poetry, mysticism, and an understanding of the human condition that is remarkable. He describes life on the Spokane Indian Reservation with poignancy and without any trace of pathos that permeates similar works. His characters are fully drawn and occupy real space, and the reader feels that he has actually spent time with them. To repeat, it is an angry as well as a funny book. The reader's decisions to laugh out loud or surreptitiously will probably be an indication of how well that person is comfortable with hiw own moral framework. I think that Alexie would want his readers, both Indian and white, to laugh "like a mandman."

Real life, on and off the Reservation. This is a collection of insightful, unflinching, yet sometimes laugh-out-loud funny snapshots of contemporary Native American life. Here is one of my favorites: "Adrian and I sat on the porch and watched the reservation. Nothing happened. From our chairs made rockers by unsteady legs, we could see that the only traffic signal on the reservation had stopped working. ... We watched the grass grow and the rivers flow." (Which, of course, is treaty language.) "It's hard to be optimistic on the reservation. When a glass sits on a table here, people don't wonder if it's half filled or half empty. They just hope it's good beer. Still, Indians have a way of surviving. But it's almost like Indians can easily survive the big stuff. Mass murder, loss of language and land rights. It's the small things that hurt the most. The white waitress who wouldn't take an order, Tonto, the Washington Redskins."

Sherman Alexie is some kind of phenomenon. In his short life (born 1966), he has garnered a truckload of accolades and can lay claim to a wide range of achievements as poet, novelist, screenwriter, filmmaker, public speaker, media personality, humorist, recognized spokesman for Native Americans, and on and on. He's won any number of prizes. And all with the inauspicious beginnings of an Indian boy, growing up on the Spokane reservation in Washington.

It's pretty easy to see the promise that is to be found in this early collection of short stories, published when he was still in his twenties. The range of literary forms and voices used to express a complexity of sentiments and a deeply rich sensibility in a writer so young is remarkable. The many customer reviews already posted here (90 as of this writing) attest to the author's impact on his readers. And he is not just a Native American writer. The mix of grief, suppressed rage, and wry humor in these 22 stories cuts through to universals underlying all cultures.

In the title story of the book, the Lone Ranger and Tonto do not make an appearance, let alone fight, but what the relationship between these two men represents to Indians infuses the entire book. This particular story begins and ends with encounters with white men - the first concerning a late-night visit to a 7-11, where the initial fearful suspicion of the white clerk relaxes as his Indian customer starts to joke with him. Later, the narrator is forced to admit that a white basketball player is better than he is. In between, the story tells of his return from the city to live again on the reservation, his concerned mother, a white girlfriend, and an aimlessness that resolves into finding a job. Like Tonto, for better or worse, he makes a place for himself in the white man's world.

Probably the best-known story from this collection is "This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona," made into the film "Smoke Signals," about the quirky and unlikely companionship between two young Indians who drive to Arizona to retrieve the remains of the dead father of one of them. My personal favorite, however, is "The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor," about a dying man who makes light of every adversity. His encounter with a racist, corrupt cop is full of clever, laugh-out-loud wit, and his relationship with his wife is told with deeply tender humor.

I heartily recommend this book as an introduction to modern Indian literature. It captures for anyone with a mind and heart the complexities of Indian identity that lie behind the stereotypes that prevail in the popular imagination - whether racist or sentimental. Readers of Alexie's books will also like Adrian Louis' novel, "Skins."

Sherman Alexie writes a powerful description of the Native American's life in the modern world. He uses methaphors to engage the reader into a deeper thought process which must be first understood if the book is to be useful. This book is written for intelligent people who truly want to understand what Native Americans endure and how they cope with the inhumanities placed upon them. Taken out of context, the stories in this book seem to be jumbled up pieces of a puzzle. But when the book is read in its entirety, it weaves together an elaborate portrayl of human emotion and deeper consciusness. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to be challenged by a dark yet colorful description of the Native American life.

I am an African American female who teaches writing at a private college. More than 97% of the student population is White. Sixty percent or more are from upper middle-class New England families. I mention this because I'm trying to set up a distinction here. Many of my students are not aware of the plight, culture, contributions, etc. of the American Indian, or other peoples of color. I am reminded of this daily when I am questioned as to the reason we are reading such and such. I take a deep breath, exhale, and begin a speech that I seem to have constructed years before I knew I'd need it. (I won't bore you with the details).The Chair of the English Department, who happens to be a former professor of mine, chose two of Alexie's novels for the incoming Freshmen class to read. Being a former student of "John's" I am very aware of his strong interest in Native American culture. I was not surprised then when he informed me of the books we would be reading. I love this book by Alexie. There is a kinship I feel that cannot be expressed in words. I understand the alcoholism that pervades the Native American community, the "quiet storms" that come suddenly, end quickly, but cause immeasurable damage. Poverty, Hunger, Unemployment, Depression...powerful, soul-stripping entities that can cause one to die slowly, ever so slowly, each and every day. There is a line in the novel that reminds me of something Toni Cade Bambara once said: "It's the small things that hurt the most"(p. 49). Understood, Alexie. Definitely understood. Thank you, Alexie, for this window into the hearts, minds and souls of Native American peoples. Bravo!