The last Washingtonian English Major in the world to read Sherman Alexie

Alexie’s book of short stories was published late in 1993, the year I was finishing up a family history for a philanthropic couple in Ballard and realizing that the writing job straight of college had been a fluke and represented the last of the gifts Life was to bestow freely on a man simply because he’d always been a good student. School is artificial. It rewards good students who mind their Ps and Qs without them otherwise lifting a finger. That ain’t the way life works and I realized that as soon as my first writing gig was done. By the time 1994 rolled around, I’d sent out enough resumes and made enough phone calls to realize that I wasn’t going to be writing for a living again anytime soon. In high school I was a 4.00; in college a 3.99 Summa Cum Laude; in real life I was a part-time Starbucks bean scooper and a graveyard Texaco cashier sitting behind a bullet-proof window that had long ago been removed. While I was very grateful for both of the jobs, I was keenly aware of the disparity between my expectations and reality. That was about the time Sherman Alexie’s fame literally exploded all over the Puget Sound region. He was everywhere, his books were everywhere and everyone was reading Alexie. I suspect the dose of real life and a bit of the angry white man syndrome may have played a role in my decision to forego The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and all his subsequent books until it had been so long that it would have been embarrassing to start. We’re halfway through 2013 and about the only benefit I can think of in having waited 20 years is that I’m old enough, I’ve read enough, and I’ve written enough to truly appreciate how good Sherman Alexie really is.
Ball players and magicians (of all kinds) populate the 24 stories (the latest edition includes 2 which were originally cut). Both professions require their top talents to make the impossible look easy, exactly what Alexie does in this thematically unified collection of short stories. His prose is deceptively approachable: more Hemingway than Faulkner (it is not surprising he won the Special Citation for the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction). His words are precisely and carefully colloquial, the conversations so real you almost instantly forget you’re reading them and instead lean in to hear better. As in Hemingway, his characters partake of the sacraments of real life: in this case, fry bread and Diet Pepsi, whiskey and vodka, jokes and tears. Quickly calibrated to the rhythm of life on the Spokane Indian Reservation, we settle in for a captivating story of kids and adults in dire straits surviving and dreaming, but that’s just the beginning. Like a boy hopping from rock to rock down the bank of a river, sometimes teetering, jumping left, jumping right, backing up, Alexie touches on history, myth, fantasy, emotion, storytelling and pain without missing a beat, without an awkward segue, without falling off moss-covered boulders of race and racism; all the while making his way down the bank of the river to the edge of the falls where the story comes together and pours down into a dark deep pool of resonating truth. Before the reader is aware anything extraordinary has occurred, Alexie has pulled a Camaro out of their ear and launched them bodily cross-court in a multidimensional slam dunk, all in ten pages. And then you start the next story.