The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

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Summary: Sherman Alexie
Review: I'm a junkie for short story collections - I especially like this one. Alexie writes about the Native American culture in the modern world, presenting many perspectives, both negative and postive, and distinguishing stereotypes from truths. In the end, it's engaging and entertaining.

I would recommend the movie "Smoke Signals" in addition to this text (a film that depicts some of the stories and characters presented in this collection).

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Summary: An Honest and Eye-opening Collection of Short Stories
Review: Sherman Alexie's short stories are both vivid and refreshingly honest. Discussing everything from a basketball game to a battle with cancer. Each story has such an element of truth, I find myself wondering if this is really a book of fiction. Alexie has a way of relating everything faced on the reservation with all people. While my knowledge of Indians does not go past my 7th grade study of them, I found myself relating to so many of the issues discussed. "Do you ever want kids?" I asked Norma. "Yeah, of course," she said. "I want a dozen. I want my own tribe." "You're kidding." "Kind of. Don't know if I want to raise kids in this world. It's getting uglier by the second. And not just on the reservation." (Page 207) I don't think Alexie could have captured my thoughts on the subject any better, maybe this is why I enjoyed reading "Tonto and The Lone Ranger Fistfight In Heaven" so much. It not only opened my eyes to Native Americans, but showed me there were other people that felt this way on many of the issues. A very comforting feeling. I highly recommend this book, and feel privileged at the chance to read it.

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Summary: My Review of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
Review: There are relatively few books about modern Native American life, that is, life on reservations. There are also relatively less well-written books on the subject. However, I feel that Sherman Alexie has compiled a well-balanced volume of stories into what he titled The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. The book is about an assemblage of short stories about a Native American boy named Victor who lives on a reservation in Washington. The reader indirectly learns about the character of Victor through his actions, thoughts, and speech throughout the book. His father is an alcoholic who leaves the family when Victor is young. Victor eventually falls into the same pattern as his father, and his only outlet in life is basketball. All of Victor's hardships are made unique by the setting that he is, living in a white man's world with a feeling of obligation to his native traditions. The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a great piece of literature. Sherman Alexie wrote each individual story that makes up the book as though he had lived through it (and he very well might have). It is realistic fiction with great detail. The vividly described scenes are what make the book seem personal, and it gives the book a feeling of sentimentality. Alexie is a solid writer and wrote and laid out each story well. He created a compilation of many stories and placed them in an order that flows well from one to the next. He can state a point very clearly, and in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight In Heaven he makes a lot of points. Through use of metaphor, and just by telling stories he writes about how fathers affect their children, how Native Americans are still being persecuted, Native American tradition, etc. I do not believe that there is an aspect of the book that I disliked, besides one or two stories I did not think were relevant. I wholly enjoyed reading The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. It is a fun and well-written book that has a lot to say about life, and a lot to teach about Native Americans. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys western literature.

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Summary: BRILLIANT, BITTERSWEET TALES OF LATTER-DAY AMERINDIAN LIFE
Review: 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.