The Toughest Indian in the World, and: Women on the Run (review)

The Toughest Indian in the World by Sherman Alexie. Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000

Women on the Run by Janet Campbell Hale. University of Idaho Press, 1999

In an interview published in the winter 1997 issue of Studies in American Indian Literature (SAIL), Sherman Alexie, on the brink of the screening of Smoke Signals at the Sundance Film Festival, described his novel in progress, to be entitled The Sin Eaters, as a "pretty intense" (4) futuristic story "set in the 1950s, an alternate 1950s," where "scientists have discovered the cure for cancer involves the bone marrow of Indians" (3). That projected novel appears as a long short story and the centerpiece of Alexie's book of short fiction, The Toughest Indian in the World (2000). Readers will find that these stories relate to those of the popular The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) pretty much as the novel Indian Killer (1996) relates to Reservation Blues (1995). That is, the new stories are darker--not somber, of course, and not without ample evidence of Alexie's wit, but more seriously and painfully focused on themes that have engaged him throughout his short, busy career.

As a published writer, Alexie's career began less than ten years ago with the publication of The Business of Fancydancing in 1992, a slender compilation of poems and short-short stories (typically running two to five pages in length). The stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto rarely run more than ten pages, but the title story of the new collection, at fourteen pages, is the shortest of the nine. The average page count is up to more than twenty-six. Of course, quantitative analysis, which can be so important in chemistry, is hardly a reliable measure of literary achievement, but when a writer more than doubles the bulk of his text, readers and critics will surely find themselves asking what has been gained and lost in the reaction, or--in the old Newtonian sense of it, presuming that matter can be neither created nor destroyed--how the texts have been altered. Parallel events are fairly common in literature. Consider, for example, Ken Kesey's slender masterpiece, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest relative to the epic Sometimes a Great Notion; Leslie Silko's Ceremony relative to Almanac of the Dead; James Welch's first two novels, Winter in the Blood and The Death of Jim Loney, relative to his last three, beginning with Fools Crow and most recently The Heartsong of Charging Elk (2000). In all of these cases in point, the increases in mass signaled more profound qualitative changes, and many readers would probably agree that, for some reason, shorter was somehow better.

Whether readers will prefer Alexie's more fully developed short fiction may be partly a matter of taste, but it will also depend on the readers' interest in the dominating theme of the collection--race relations, and particularly the sexual aspects thereof. Consider, for example, an early sentence from the first story, "Assimilation": "She was a Coeur d'Alene Indian married to a white man; she was a wife who wanted to have sex with an indigenous stranger" (1). While Lone Ranger and Tonto have been embraced in some public schools in the Northwest, very few school boards will welcome The Toughest Indian in the World into their curriculum. How well readers respond to this book will also depend on their tolerance for discovering that most of the white males in the stories are racist jerks. Of course, one could argue that Mary Lynn's view of white males, including her husband Jeremiah in "Assimilation," is not one that Alexie wants us as readers to share, but that would be rather implausible. Jeremiah is a racist by virtue of his hyperconcern over matters of race, and he is a jerk (among other reasons) when we...