Reservation Blues by Sherman Alexie
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Book Reviews of Reservation Blues
Book Review: a fine fable of redemption
Summary: 3 Stars
Written by Sherman Alexie, this fable about the hometown challenges of his own home town, makes a fine, sensitive novel.
This is the struggle of an Indian band - and it's this double entendre that is at the heart of his tale. Three Spokane Indians and two Flathead sisters form a musical group, which, in its character and pathologies, are a metaphor for Indians everywhere.
The band comprises two sisters, two lifelong friends, and a misfit. The sisters, Checkers and Chess Warm Water, members of the Flathead tribe, wrestle with the corruption of family. The friends, Victor and Junior, are brutalized by alcohol, crushed dreams, and aimlessness. Thomas Builds-the-Fire, a creative and sensitive man, suffers the terrifying indifference of his people. Driven by their individual ambitions, each makes their own deal with the devil in exchange for the promise of a better life.
Among a host of horrors Alexie parades before our characters, the greatest tragedy is their rejection by their own tribe, a consequence of their struggle to rise above the provincial dissolution of the reservation.
Yet some of Alexie's characters survive. For them, redemption comes from their capacity as individuals and as a band to thread a course between hopeless surrender and the ravaging predations of white culture. The heroism of Alexie's protagonists lies in their quiet self-awareness and the courage to be the individuals they are: neither white doppelgangers nor Indian cliches.
Side plots and supplementary characters shoot like the limbs of an unpruned tree: while their fruit is often lovely, the tree suffers from diffusion. But the writing makes it all worthwhile: Alexie is funny and pleasurable to read. The rewards of dialog and scene construction are, by themselves, worth the price of admission.