The Toughest Indian in the World [Hardcover]

Sherman Alexie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2000

A beloved American writer whose books are championed by critics and readers alike, Sherman Alexie has been hailed by Time as "one of the better new novelists, Indian or otherwise". Now his acclaimed new collection, The Toughest Indian in the World, which received universal praise in hardcover, is available in paperback.

In these stories, we meet the kind of American Indians we rarely see in literature -- the kind who pay their bills, hold down jobs, fall in and out of love. A Spokane Indian journalist transplanted from the reservation to the city picks up a hitchhiker, a Lummi boxer looking to take on the toughest Indian in the world. A Spokane son waits for his diabetic father to come home from the hospital, tossing out the Hershey Kisses the father has hidden all over the house. An estranged interracial couple, separated in the midst of a traffic accident, rediscover their love for each other. A white drifter holds up an International House of Pancakes, demanding a dollar per customer and someone to love, and emerges with $42 and an overweight Indian he dubs Salmon Boy. Sherman Alexie's voice is one of remarkable passion, and these stories are love stories -- between parents and children, white people and Indians, movie stars and ordinary people. Witty, tender, and fierce, The Toughest Indian in the World is a virtuoso performance by one of the country's finest writers.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Call Sherman Alexie any number of things--novelist, poet, filmmaker, thorn in the side of white liberalism--just don't call him "universal." Aside from his well-documented distaste for the word, its fuzziness misses the point. The Toughest Indian in the World, Alexie's second collection, succeeds as brilliantly as it does because of its particularity. These aren't stories about the Indian Condition; they're stories about Indians--urban and reservation, street fighters and yuppies, husbands and wives. "She understood that white people were eccentric and complicated and she only wanted to be understood as eccentric and complicated as well," thinks the Coeur d'Alene narrator of "Assimilation," who's married (unhappily) to a white man. And yet the issue of race has taken up permanent residence inside her house: the marriage survives, but it's love that's the most thorough assimilation of all.

Like The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, much of The Toughest Indian in the World combines deft psychological realism with the kind of narrative logic more commonly found in dreams. In "South by Southwest," a white drifter finds love on a "nonviolent killing spree" with an overweight Indian he calls Salmon Boy; in "Dear John Wayne," the cowboy actor falls in love with a young Spokane woman and proves himself a charmingly feminist hero. ("Oh, sons, you're just engaging in some harmless gender play," he tells his boys when he finds them trying on lipstick.) But for every bear hibernating on top of the Catholic church, there's also a GAP-wearing, Toyota-driving urban Indian on a quest for his roots. In both realist and surrealist modes, Alexie writes incantatory prose--as well as the kind of dialogue that makes even secondary characters leap into sudden focus: "'What?' asked Wonder Horse, as simple a question as could possibly be tendered, though he made it sound as if he'd asked Where's the tumor?"

Alexie is sometimes guilty of painting his white characters with too broad a brush. (Is any anthropologist truly as obtuse as the one in "Dear John Wayne"? Could any reader really want Mary Lynn, the narrator of "Assimilation," to stay with her boorish white husband?) Yet his kind of firebrand politics still has the power to shock. A harrowing fable about whites kidnapping Indians for the medical properties of their blood, "The Sin Eaters" could be dismissed as paranoid if it weren't so hauntingly written:

On that morning, the sun rose and bloomed like blood in a glass syringe. The entire Spokane Indian Reservation and all of its people and places were clean and scrubbed. The Spokane River rose up from its bed like a man who had been healed and joyously wept all the way down to its confluence with the Columbia River. There was water everywhere: a thousand streams interrupted by makeshift waterfalls; small ponds hidden beneath a mask of thick fronds and anonymous blossoms; blankets of dew draped over the shoulders of isolated knolls. An entire civilization of insects lived in the mud puddle formed by one truck tire and a recent rain storm. The blades of grass, the narrow pine needles, and the stalks of roadside wheat were as sharp and bright as surgical tools.

It's a hard story to read, and that's only right. The Toughest Indian in the World offers so many pleasures, who could deny it the power to disturb us as well? Funny, dreamlike, heartbreaking, angry--these are stories that could have been written by no one but Sherman Alexie. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

A prolific novelist, poet and screenplay writer, Alexie (Indian Killer; Reservation Blues) has been hailed as one of the best young writers of his generation. This dexterous second collection of stories contains what may be one of the best short fiction pieces of the year. "The Toughest Indian in the World" follows a young Spokane Indian who works at an all-white newspaper in Seattle and, in a forlorn attempt to reconnect with his roots, has his first homosexual experience with a tough Lummi fighter. It's a moving story that skillfully employs symbolism and flashbacks to construct an ending that is both uplifting and sorrowful. Many of the eight other stories in this collection also deal with urban Indians who are straddling two worlds: an intimate but indigent life on the reservation and an affluent but strange and sometimes hostile white middle-class existence. Their solutions to this double bind are rarely ordinary. "Assimilation" tells of a Coeur d'Alene woman who deliberately cheats on her white husband, only to rediscover her affection for him in the middle of a traffic jam. "Class" features a Spokane who sometimes tells white women he's Aztec, because "there were aphrodisiacal benefits from claiming to be descended from ritual cannibals." In "South by Southwest" a white man and a fat Indian nicknamed Salmon Boy, who declares he's not homosexual but does believe in love, set off on a nonviolent killing spree. Two tales, "Saint Junior" and "A Good Man," deal with marriage and death on the rez. The anger in these narratives is leavened by Alexie's acerbic wit and his obvious belief in the redemptive power of love. One exception, however, is "The Sin Eaters," an apocalyptic tale in which America's Indians are rounded up into massive underground prisons where soldiers force them to breed and give up their blood. Humorous, disturbing, formally inventive and heartwarming, Alexie's stories continually surprise, revealing him once again as a master of his craft. Agent, Nancy Cahoon, N. Stauffer Assoc. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 238 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press; 1st edition (May 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0965010481
• ISBN-13: 978-0965010481
• ASIN: 0871138018
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (46 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #420,203 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #83 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Native American

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 59 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The reservation called America, May 8, 2000

By 

Ron Franscell, Author of 'Sourtoe Cocktail Club' - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Toughest Indian in the World (Hardcover)

"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.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars very, very good work, June 5, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Toughest Indian in the World (Hardcover)

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.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Meeting "The Toughest Indian in the World", July 12, 2004

By 

Gregory Bernard Banks ", author" (Atlanta area) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Toughest Indian in the World (Paperback)

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.