Pass the fry bread, please!

Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


If reading Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is like running alongside a longhouse with 24 windows, getting 24 glimpses or mental snapshots of life inside, Reservation Blues is like being invited in and offered a can of Pepsi, a hot piece of fry bread and a place to crash. You are there for the awkward silences and shy smiles, the pettiness and jealousy of a small community, the loyalty and tradition, the despair and depression. In Fistfight, you’re buoyed by the narrator’s survival and the artificial decorum of a brief visit. In Reservation Blues you’re living on the reservation; tempted to turn away from particularly painful moments and compelled to stand solemnly when “characters” you’ve come to care for fall beside you. In the terminology of white American history, Reservation Blues is a Tall Tale with larger-than-life everything . If we look for a more universal term, the “magical realism” of Gabriel Garcia Marquez comes to mind and explains what Alexie probably meant when he coined the term “reservation realism.” Some folks have probably criticized Reservation Blues for being too preachy and heavy-handed but we’re talking about a couple hundred years of brutality and genocide so I think it’s fair to cut Alexie a little slack. While I was disappointed that Robert Johnson didn’t play as significant a role as I expected, the real Coyote Spring’s lyrics are fitting tributes to his legacy.



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