Customer Reviews

The Toughest Indian in the World.

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"Deep in the heart of the heart of every Indian man's heart, he believes he is Crazy Horse," Sherman Alexie writes in "The Toughest Indian in the World," his new collection of renegade short stories. And that might mean, um, you are Custer.

Or it might just mean Alexie wants you to understand the pride and rage behind these nine lyrical, rebellious, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking stories, where Indians find themselves between worlds, between lives, and between loves.

Fiction writers simulate real life, they don't really bottle it. Alexie is one of the best American writers of any color today, but not because he writes about Indians as an Indian. Rather, it's because he observes the multi-colored light of *human* existence through indigenous eyes. His prism is a valuable cultural artifact on this reservation we call America.

Alexie's latest book is very good. The longest story, The Sin Eaters, didn't quite come together for me, but most everything else is extremely readable. These works have a strong sense of the Northwest in them, especially the Spokane Indian reservation Alexie grew up on. They're hardly provincial, though, embracing varieties of character, place, and theme.

The characters are usually Indian, often from the Spokane tribe, but also from many other tribes. Sometimes, one wishes Alexie didn't feel it necessary to repeat phrases so often, but his skills are too superior for that to be anything but a minor hitch. There's a great deal of imagination, and an awful lot of strength, behind his best stories: One Good Man, for example, is an elegant, blunt and elegaic image of a Spokane and his dying father. The wonder is at his ability to, in about a decade, produce so many books at a consistently high quality. He's gone from his roots as a very personal chronicler of his native people to, in this collection, an analysis of a failing marriage involving a Microsoft plebian, without hesitation. His writing could use some improvements, but he's still just in his early 30s, and already at the highest literary levels.

With impressive consistency, this book gathers up deeply interesting characters, puts them on the page, and demands that we pay attention to them. And indeed, it is the vigorous, blemished, unheroic and occasionally violent characters of Alexie's work who represent his greatest skill. His sparse and blunt style concentrates on character and plot: Metaphor and imagery are secondary concerns. In summary: buy this book, buy his other books, and plan on buying the books he'll write in the future.

I'd been hearing a lot about Sherman Alexie prior to reading this. His work has been talked about frequently, and The New Yorker has selected him as one of the best American fiction writers under 40. As an aspiring writer myself, I decided to pick up one of his books to judge for myself. And I'm glad I did.

In Alexie's collection of short stories, The Toughest Indian in the World, he takes a look at the world from the perspectives of various Native American characters from all walks of life. From Assimilation, the story of an interracial couple, an Indian woman and a white man, trying to wade through societal pressures and cultural differences to rediscover their love for one another, to Dear John Wayne, the amusing and touching story of an elderly Native American woman recounting her alleged, brief love affair with the "real" John Wayne, these stories are about everyday people trying to find their place in this multicultural, yet divided world.

If you have fragile sensibilities, you may find this book a bit overwhelming at times. Many of the stories in this collection deal with controversial subjects such as race and sexuality with a bluntness that can be surprising to say the least. Mr. Alexie writes about these things with such frankness, never treating them with any hint of the shame or stigma often attached to them, that the reader is given the opportunity to explore them from a perspective he or she may not have considered before. Alexie treats them naturally, as normal aspects of our daily lives. And this is how it should be.

I noticed a surrealistic, sometimes tongue-in-cheek quality to Alexie's work. Some stories will leave you with a gentle smile, while others will linger in your mind long after, perhaps causing you to look at the world around you differently. Some of my favorite stories are South By Southwest, which takes us on an odyssey with Seymour, a disillusioned, heterosexual white man desperately searching for excitement and love. In his quest to find them, he holds up a House of Pancakes, demanding one dollar from each of its patrons and a traveling companion who could possibly fall in love with him. Surprisingly, he leaves the restaurant with forty-two dollars and a fat Native American man he dubs "Salmon Boy." The two travel from Spokane, Washington to the state of Arizona on a "non-violent killing spree," all the while exploring the possibility of finding true love with one another.

The very next story, The Sin Eaters, is the powerful story of an Indian boy snatched from his parents by an invading troop of soldiers, and along with hundreds, maybe even thousands, of others, is taken to a secret government facility to be used for experiments that neither the child, or the reader, ever fully understands. But the underlying emotions of despair, confusion, and the overall sense of violation and outrage at the mistreatment of a proud race of people, ring crystal clear.

Finally, perhaps my favorite is One Good Man, about a teacher who returns to the reservation in which he grew up to care for his father, who is dying of cancer. The love between these two is strong, and Alexie paints a beautiful portrait of a man struggling to cope with the impending loss of his father, while trying to understand his role in the world, often posing the question, "What is an Indian?" to himself throughout the piece. This story's poignancy will likely leave you with a smile on your face and tear in your eye. There are nine stories in all in this collection, and every one is a definite must read.

The Toughest Indian in the World is a broad, blunt, yet touching journey into the frustrating yet glorious things that make us human. Sherman Alexie's previous collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (which was the basis for his award-winning screenplay for the film, Smoke Signals), won him much acclaim and millions of fans around the world.

And now that I've read, The Toughest Indian in the World, he has one more.

I was impressed by Alexie's previous work, particularly "The Lone Ranger and Tonto..." and "Reservation Blues"; but I found myself rather disappointed with his latest work. Although there are some fine moments, this book lacks the humor and Rez-life reality that his other work possesses. Alexie may simply be avoiding over-trod ground; but the new direction he has taken is one which I do not care to follow. At times this book was a very long walk. I have used Alexie's stories from "Lone Ranger and Tonto..." in my high school English class, and it worked very well. Students laughed out loud and were able to recognize themselves in the stories. I would not do the same with "The Toughest Indian...", because those connections have been lost.

As much as I've loved Alexie's work in the past, I'm sorry to say this book really disappointed me. There is certainly some lovely prose and a few moments that truly moved me, but overall this book, for me, simply lacked the sparkle and emotion always present in Alexie's previous works. There were moments, in fact, where I felt he was simply trying to shock us with the writing, which seems way too cheap for a writer of such talent.

"Writin' is fightin'!" poet/novelist/essayist Ishmael Reed has declared. No doubt. Saying the pen (or the word processor) is mightier than the sword recognizes that literacy and literature are heavy weapons. Writers I respect and cherish wield words effectively to combat ignorance, bias, prejudice, limited expectations, all sorts of social and intellectual short-sightedness. A writer throws down a gauntlet to the reader-"Deal with this!" A really good writer will likewise challenge himself.

Sherman Alexie steps up with his second collection of short stories. Here are only about half as many stories as THE LONE RANGER AND TONTO FISTFIGHT IN HEAVEN, but they're longer, fuller. They evidence his growth, maturity, in craft and imagination. Though he's not above old tricks like narrative sleight-of-hand - his ironic sense of humor is, if anything, even wryer - his style, while still lean, is now not quite so spare.

THE TOUGHEST INDIAN IN THE WORLD reflects Alexie's and his characters' journeys in "the adult world." They must make choices about who they are, where they live and what they do, and especially, who they're with. Then again, just as journalist Louis Lomax noted, every writer ("like every preacher") has "one great theme" that he returns to over and again. Alexie's is (to borrow from James Baldwin) "the price of the ticket," that two-way cost of modern Indian assimilation - forward and outward into "American" society, while yet attempting to bridge the disconnection from tradition and heritage.

These stories range in emotional resonance from resigned sigh to primal scream. They depict, often, people at personal crossroads. In fact, love and choice (with "love," particularly, in the sense of M. Scott Peck's landmark THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED - the expression of a will and commitment to enable spiritual growth and respect uniqueness - not to be confused with "romance") are the source of their drama - and the elusive solution.

There are the Coeur d'Alene woman high-tech executive and the city-bred Spokane corporate lawyer, each living "the American dream" life while harboring inner rage at the choices they've made, their self-reflective rage literally finding stereotypic Indian figures to help shatter their "civilized" boundaries. There's the feckless poet looking for love in all the wrong people. The pudgy teenager willing to be the hostage of an inept, alienated holdup man. Most harrowing (and deliberately so, since it's a literal nightmare) is the protracted horror of a young boy swept along in the cascading events of "the final solution of the Indian problem."

There's some wistfulness also: The recollections of the woman loved by John Wayne on the set of "The Searchers." The adult son who extends himself to ease the last days of his diabetic amputee father. And my favorite, "Saint Junior," where the recognition that a married couple achieves strikes me as being, really, about anything you truly hold dear in life: Affection is helpful, maybe essential, but will and commitment get the job done...

"He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing. Other people claimed that you can't choose who you love--it just happens!--but Grace and Roman knew that was a bunch... Of course you chose who you loved. If you didn't choose, you ended up with what was left--the drunks and abusers, the debtors and vacuums, the ones who ate their food too fast or had never read a novel. Damn, marriage was hard work, was manual labor, and unpaid manual labor at that. Yet, year after year, Grace and Roman had pressed their shoulders against the stone and rolled it up the hill together."

The best thing I can say about this book (keeping in mind it was like "dessert," the third Alexie book I read in one week - yes, that taken by his work!) is that a year later, I can still feel the stories. Know what I mean? They "live" with me! Like someone's children you've grown fond of, you may forget the names but you don't forget the shape of the faces, the outline and texture of their personalities, your emotional response to them. And you're sure that you'll carry the memory with you for the rest of your life.

Though admittedly inconsistent and often unfocused and needlessly labryrinthine, Alexie's collection of short stories never cease to provide surprise, insight and honest revelation into the search for identity, place and history.

The stories selected here all search for the answer to what makes "the toughest Indian" but also what makes the "toughest human". Alexie provides many possible answers for this universal theme throughout his printed song cycle. As with all of Alexie's work, THE TOUGHEST INDIAN IN THE WORLD resounds with humor, tragedy and tender hope.These stories bodly confront the conflict between tradition, assimilation and duty. With this collection he also adds a strain of homo-eroticism as well as a celebration of education (I find it fascinating that most of his protagonists are educated and literate).

Alexie stands as one of America's finest contemporary writers. While this may not serve as his greatest work (that may be yet to come), it does provide an excellent must read.

"The Toughest Indian in the World" is one of Sherman Alexie's collections of short stories. It comes before his most recent collection ("Ten Little Indians") but before "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" (which features many of the characters who would later appear in Alexie's novel "Reservation Blues"). It is also the first one I read. Unfortunately, I feel like it may not have been the best first choice.

Alexie is a wonderful writer, of whom I am a huge fan. His writings usually revolve around the lives of various Indian ("bow and arrow not dot on the head") characters and their complicated feelings about the reservation they love while being desperate to get away from it. This collection of stories follows a similar theme.

The thing about short stories is they're short. Writers only have a limited amount of time to explain everything and to develop characters. I don't know how other readers feel, but I'm of a mind that I like Alexie better as a novelist because there is more time to get to know his unique characters and understand his (at times) complex plots. I found "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" to be more engaging because different stories clearly refer to the same characters--making them more dimensional.

Back to this collection:

As is true with any talented writer, Alexie does have some gems here. "Saint Junior," "One Good Man," and "South by Southwest" are especial favorites of this reviewer possibly because these stories most resemble the combination of acerbic humor and gravity common to Alexie's novels. To take "Saint Junior" as an example: Alexie examines the relationship between a married couple who met at "Saint Junior" university and continue to choose each other every day. In the story, the husband goes to take his SAT's wearing a traditional dance costume while, later in the story, his wife preserves the tribal tradition of making Salmon mush.

These stories are not passive. If anything, they are visceral. This collection combines elements of magical realism with painfully real moments of sadness and hardship in the lives of Alexie's modern Indian characters.

The main problem I saw with this collection is that it remained distractingly distant. Most protagonists go unnamed, sometimes barely described, which makes it difficult to connect with either the characters or their stories. Worse, the stories alternate between nearly absorbing to disturbingly jarring. "The Sin Eaters" hauntingly presents an apocalyptic world where Indians are put through their own kind of Holocaust. This story is angry and, no doubt, important. But by the end it is too angry and too horrific, so that it became a chore to read the remainder of the book for fear of what other catastrophes it might describe.

Any fan of Sherman Alexie's writing will want to read through "The Toughest Indian in the World" to get a better sense of Alexie's work on the whole. That said, readers unfamiliar with Alexie would be better off beginning with one of his novels or perhaps a different story collection.

Man, everytime I read Alexie, I am reminded just HOW MUCH I love his work. When not actively reading him, I am aware that I think he is a brilliant author, but it seems that I must be in the act of devouring his words in order to become fully aware of the depths of my feelings. This is an AMAZING collection of short stories. Vignettes are where I think Alexie shines brightest, so that is a good thing. (Both his poetry and fiction are great, don't get me wrong, and "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven" was a great blend of inter-connected vignettes (much like Sandra Cisneros's "House on Mango Street")). The title story blew my mind.

This was a stunningly beautiful collection of stories. In the beginning I was a bit thrown off by some of the frank and unexpected sexual goings-on, but not for too long. Starting halfway through the book, with "The Sin Eaters" I felt that the stories began to be better than in the beginning. They were always good, but with "The Sin Eaters" and especially by "Indian Country" they were AMAZING!! The last four stories in this collection are some of the best writing I've ever read. *contented sigh* Just gorgeous and so powerful. (some of the observations about anthropologists and Collegiate responses/teachings to/about Native Americans were spot on and very amusing/cutting).

i think that sherman alexies work is one of the most commendable writings to come out this century .. he has given pride and dignity and reality back to the first peoples of this land called northamerica. He has written books i believe for the red people and its about time somebody has. enough of these phoney so called native american writers , they are bunk, sherman is the real thing . definatley the best writing ive read in a long time, and hats of to all indians makin it in this world that isnt ours anymore but we are forced to live in it so lets make the best of it we can for ourselves annd our children. i hope this makes sense im not really a writer .