The text is a collection of 22 loosely connected short stories, all dealing with Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest. But they all breathe in and out, and put one foot in front of the other. Some of these people get the good more than others, some seem to inherit mostly the bad. The good and the bad are there, but these characters keep plugging away, day after day. There is much melancholy and sadness in this book, but despite that there beats beneath the surface of all of these stories a persistent embrace of life. I read THE LONE RANGER AND TONTO FISTFIGHT IN HEAVEN at that time, mainly because of the influence of a good professor, and that awesome title! Revisiting it 20 plus years later this text resonates in a different way for me. I was introduced to the work of Sherman Alexie in college. Against a backdrop of alcohol, car accidents, laughter, and basketball, Alexie depicts the distances between Indians and whites, reservation Indians and urban Indians, men and women, and most poetically, between modern Indians and the traditions of the past.
Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who tells his stories long after people stop listening, and Jimmy Many Horses, dying of cancer, who writes letters on stationary that reads "From the Death Bed of James Many Horses III," even though he actually writes them on his kitchen table. There is Victor, who as a nine-year-old crawled between his unconscious parents hoping that the alcohol seeping through their skins might help him sleep. These 22 interlinked tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, and yet are filled with passion and affection, myth and dream. In this darkly comic short story collection, Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, brilliantly weaves memory, fantasy, and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic portrait of life in and around the Spoke Indian Reservation.
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