Of reconciliation and relationships ; Sherman Alexie shows a more mature side in `The Toughest Indian in the World'
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"The Toughest Indian in the World"
by Sherman Alexie
Atlantic Monthly Press, $24
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"There were Indians who belonged on the reservation and there were Indians who belonged in the city," muses the narrator of "Saint Junior," a story from Sherman Alexie's new collection, "The Toughest Indian in the World," "and then there were those rare few who could live successfully in either place."
Alexie, a Seattle resident and Spokane / Coeur d'Alene Indian raised on the Spokane reservation, inhabits a number of worlds. Novelist ("Indian Killer"), short-story writer, poet ("I Would Steal Horses"), screenwriter and movie producer ("Smoke Signals"), even political spokesman (President Clinton's PBS panel on race), Alexie, still in his early 30s, risks becoming what he calls, derisively, the "Indian du jour."
But Alexie's public persona in no way overshadows the talent evident in "The Toughest Indian in the World," a short-story collection more mature, self-assured and witty than "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven," the book that established Alexie's literary reputation.
One of the strengths of "Toughest Indian" is its community of endearing, odd characters. In the title story, an unnamed Indian newspaper reporter picks up a hitchhiking Lummi reservation fighter, a character from the reporter's Indian past, redolent with the smell of salmon, his face battered by both physical blows and racial decimation. Late at night, a surprising encounter between the reporter and the fighter resurrects new tribal memories in the expatriate Indian.
In "Assimilation," Microsoft employee Mary Lynn, an Indian woman married to a Caucasian, yearns to commit adultery with "the whitest man in Seattle" (she settles, appropriately, for a "flabby Norwegian" from Ballard). Mary Lynn and her husband reunite after they witness a tragic incident on the backed-up 520 bridge. Their renewed harmony is the first instance in "Toughest Indian" of Alexie's theme of reconciliation.
This bringing together of estranged people (and peoples) reaches its apex in "South by Southwest." In this story, middle-age, lonely Seymour robs an International House of Pancakes, and in an effort to follow the unwritten rules of a crime spree, he takes along a romantic hostage. His willing victim is a pudgy Indian man whom Seymour names Salmon Boy. Together, this odd couple find in thievery and escape the source for understanding all kinds of love.
The stories in "The Toughest Indian in the World" celebrate earthy, physical relationships as well. In "Indian Country," Low Man Smith, a successful "half-breed" mystery writer, meets up with former flame Tracy - now a lesbian on a book tour. The addition of 40 pounds has made Tracy even more desirable. "I love all of your chins," Low Man tells her, warming with lust.
Low Man's attraction fuels his defense of Tracy and her girlfriend, Sara, against Sara's homophobic parents, who also disparage Low Man's talents. "You're one of the funny Indians, enit?" Sara's father says to the writer.
While most of Alexie's characters are "funny" Indians, facing white people's ignorance with great humor, in "The Sin Eaters," sadly, they are mere cutouts.
"The Sin Eaters," a grim, apocalyptic parable of colonization, is an anomaly in "Toughest Indian." Its clunky symbolism about Indians used as "blood slaves" for whites makes it less effective than the other stories in the collection. "The Sin Eaters" displays the same excesses found in parts of Alexie's "Indian Killer," and the story distracts from the more subtle but no less powerful observations found in the sly, sarcastic stories.
A story that embodies the meaning, language and tone of all the others is the concluding piece, "One Good Man." In this gentle, moving story, an educated Indian man returns to his reservation to help his diabetic father cope with the amputation of both of his feet.
"What is an Indian?" the story and the narrator ask. The answer to that question lies in how the son cares for his father with quiet tenderness, remembering his late mother's pride and strength in the face of reservation poverty and violence; his memories bring his family together and bring him back in spirit to the reservation.
Despite the collection's emotional strength and humor, it is not without problems. Some of the stories are episodes, without plot or even clear narration. They can be self-indulgent, too, especially when Alexie is speeding toward a good joke.
But none of these flaws marred the collection for me. I was happy to meet such savvy, smart-aleck characters as Low Man; Wonder Horse and Sweetwater, the reservation carpenters in "One Good Man"; and, in "Dear John Wayne," Indian elder Etta Joseph, the centenarian former lover of America's most famous cowboy movie star.
What is an Indian? It's too much for one person, even Sherman Alexie, to answer that question - it's too much for one book. But we can look to Alexie and his prodigious imagination to give us the jokers, the geniuses, the Seattleites and reservation dwellers - all the Indians he so ably creates in "The Toughest Indian in the World."
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Author appearance
Sherman Alexie will read from "The Toughest Indian in the World" and a new collection of poems and essays, "One-Stick Song," at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at Town Hall, 1119 Eighth Ave., Seattle. Sponsored by the Elliott Bay Book Co. Information: 206-624-6600.