The American Century: Literature since 1945 793the rock singer Lou Reed serves as an epitaph to one of Alexie’s books. It offers
another handy compass to the reader when entering all of them. This is a fiction on
fast-forward, careering wildly in tone and packed with characters close to caricature.
But always, at the back, we can hear echoes of older, still enduring ways of
understanding and being in the world that remain distinctive to Native American
culture. Among the many other elements that coexist here, in this tense, dynamic
fictive environment, are matter and memory, present and past.
Alexie, who comes from the Spokane and Coeur d’Alene tribes, has produced a
substantial body of work. There have been thirteen collections of poetry (including
The Business of Fancydancing (1992), First Indian on the Moon (1993), Old Shirts and
New Skins (1993), Dangerous Astronomy (2005) and Face (2009)), three volumes of
short stories (among them, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1998)),
three novels (Reservation Blues, Indian Killer (1997) and Flight (2007)), and a novel
for young adults (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)). Much of
this work relates to the area in and around the Spokane reservation in the eastern
part of Washington State. This is the setting, for instance, for most of Reservation
Blues. It is a divided, dual territory that seems both disabling and empowering. “The
word gone echoed all over the reservation. The reservation was gone itself, just a
shell of its former self, just a fragment of the whole,” we learn during the course of
the novel. “But the reservation still possessed power and rage, music and loss, joys
and jealousy,” the narrator then adds. “The reservation tugged at the lives of its
Indians, stole from them in the middle of the night, watched impassively as the
horses and salmon disappeared. But the reservation forgave too.” A crossroads near
Wellpinit, “the only town on the reservation,” is appropriately the starting point for
the story. The African-American blues guitarist Robert Johnson miraculously
arrives there. Having made a deal with the “Gentleman,” or the Devil, to become a
great guitarist, he has, he says, been on the run since faking his death in 1938. “Old
and tired” now, and unable to play his guitar, he has “walked from crossroads to
crossroads”; he has traveled to the reservation in search of a cure for a sickness he
“can’t get rid of.” His guitar is taken up by a young Spokane Indian on the reservation
called Victor Joseph. With two other young Spokane Indians, Junior Polatkin and
Thomas Builds-the Fire, Victor then forms an “all-Indian rock and blues band,”
calling themselves Coyote Springs. The blues they play are, we are told, “ancient,
aboriginal, indigenous.” Sticking to cover versions of songs by other musicians at
first, they gradually turn to their own “new songs.” Energetic, eclectic, chaotic, these
songs are an apt expression for a generation of Indians who have grown up watching
“bad television,” eating fast food or “wish sandwiches” – “two slices of bread with
only wishes in between” – and who are constantly reminded that “white people
owned everything.” At first, the band enjoys some success. They are even invited to
New York by an outfit called Cavalry Records to make some demonstration tapes.
The trip and the recording tryout are, however, both disastrous. The band falls apart.
Victor sinks into alcoholism and apathy; Junior kills himself; and Thomas, who
gradually emerges as the central character, leaves the “rez” for the city accompanied
by Chess and Checkers Warm Water, two sisters from the Flathead reservation inGGray_c05.indd 793ray_c 05 .indd 793 8 8/1/2011 7:31:45 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 45 PM