The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven- Sherman Alexie (Washington)

It is difficult to label Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, a portrait of life on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington, as either a novel or a short story collection. The twenty-two vignettes are at once independent stories and one affecting narrative. Against a backdrop of fierce basketball tournaments and the depleting salmon population, the tension between city-dwelling Urbans and reservation Skins, and the still deeply-entrenched racism present on both sides of the ethnic line, Alexie, himself a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian, weaves a comprehensive description of reservation life in this small town near Seattle. The rain-soaked climate of the Northwest is given its due, with Alexie nodding to the occasionally oppressive moisture by saying that “the same bit of oxygen gets breathed over and over, passed through a hundred pairs of lungs”. But perhaps the most poignant section of Alexie’s work is devoted to two subjects. One, the tradition of story-telling, is captured in Thomas Builds-a-Fire, the half-crazy, half-inspired young man who spins his stories even after everyone is sick of listening. The other is alcoholism, a pervasive aspect of life both suffocating and seeming impossible to avoid. “Believe me”, James Many Horses says near the novel’s close, “everything looks like a noose if you stare at it long enough”. The power of Alexie’s stories is that this anguish is coupled with, and countered by, a combination of literary eloquence and searing honesty that makes it not only impossible to look away, but near impossible to despair.

–Melanie Jones