The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven: Stories
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About this ebook
The twenty-four linked tales in Alexie’s debut collection—an instant classic—paint an unforgettable portrait of life on and around the Spokane Indian Reservation, a place where “Survival = Anger x Imagination,” where HUD houses and generations of privation intertwine with history, passion, and myth.
We follow Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the longwinded storyteller no one really listens to; his half-hearted nemesis, Victor, the basketball star turned recovering alcoholic; and a wide cast of other vividly drawn characters on a haunting journey filled with humor and sorrow, resilience and resignation, dreams and reality. Alexie’s unadulterated honesty and boundless compassion come together in a poetic vision of a world in which the gaps between past and present are not really gaps after all.
The basis for the acclaimed 1998 feature film Smoke Signals,the Chicago Tribune noted, “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven . . . is for the American Indian what Richard Wright’s Native Son was for the black American in 1940.”
The collection received a Special Citation for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction.
This ebook edition features a new prologue from the author, as well as an illustrated biography and rare photos from Sherman Alexie’s personal collection.
Sherman Alexie
Sherman Alexie (1966), novelista, poeta y cineasta, creció en la reserva india Spokane, en Wellpinit. Reconocido desde sus inicios como uno de los mejores novelistas estadounidenses, fue incluido en la selección de escritores jóvenes americanos de Granta y recibió el Boston Globe por ser una voz importante de la literatura de su país. Su obra narrativa, que incluye la novela Blues de la reserva y los libros de relatos Ten Little Indians y The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven, ha recibido numerosos premios y menciones. Sherman Alexie reside en Seattle. Su primera novela juvenil El diario completamente verídico de un indio a tiempo parcial recibió el National Book Award en 2007, y su trama crítica e ingeniosa sigue tan vigente que está en preparación la versión cinematográfica.
Read more from Sherman Alexie
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Reviews for The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
649 ratings35 reviews
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5In 1993, I was in Okinawa when I first saw "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven." The short story book was on the shelves of a USMC military store (PX). I didn't buy but thought it was an odd title. While in San Diego, I attended one of his lectures at the University of San Diego back in 2001. His EGO was too big for my taste but being an Injun myself I had to see what the fuss was all about with this guy. A few years later, I had to read the parts of the "Fistfight" at the university in Meridian, Mississippi. I didn't particularly like his writing style, thought Silko's writing more engaging. From what little I read of his memoir, it seems to be his best. Too bad he was canceled; however, it didn't surprise me.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Sherman Alexie is a powerful, poignant, and hilarious writer. This is a fantastic short story collection, and one which I will be glad to teach next semester.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The tone of these twenty-four stories is so consistent, with characters appearing in multiple stories, that it reads more like one long story with the protagonist switching from one character to another, Victor or his cousin, or Adrian, or Thomas Builds-the-Fire. What emerges is an impression of late 20th century life on the Spokane Reservation. And life there is both the same and different than it is elsewhere. Poor children grow up seeing their parents or their relatives as heroes. Some people drink too much; others drink diet-Pepsi. Some people are good at basketball. Others are good at stories. A few are good at school, though education rarely serves them well. But permeating everything is the question of what it means to be an Indian (the term that these characters use to refer to themselves) here, now, and tomorrow.Alexie’s writing is relaxed and accessible, even when it soars lyrically. The stories give the impression of simplicity — broad brush strokes, well-marked action, sentimental moral — but just below the surface there lies a painful personal encounter with history. When everything you do is another chapter in the tragic history of Native Americans, it’s hard to just play basketball. At times Alexie’s characters sound like they desperately want to escape their own cultural baggage, while at others they reconcile themselves to carrying the load at least to next rest station.I look forward to reading more from Sherman Alexie.Recommended.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is Alexie's breakthrough book that some call a collection of short stories and others a interconnected novel. No matter what you call it, its a wonderful and beautiful series of stories that tells of the lives of American Indians in the Pacific Northwest in the 70's and 80's. Some are just that, stories about life, like "The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn't Flash Anymore", where a couple of guys hang out on the porch and what the world go by at their feet. To the almost science-fiction story called "Distances", where Alexie examines what might happen after some apocalypse where the only survivors are Indians living on the "Rez".I'm not a poetry guy, but a lot of the time this book reads as prose for poetry. Excellent."Hell, my joy in winning is always much smaller than my pain in losing." - Introduction"It's hard to be optimistic on the reservation. When a glass sits on the table here, people don't wonder if it's half filled or half empty. They just hope its good beer. Still, Indians have a way of surviving. But it's almost like Indians can easily survive the big stuff. Mass murder, loss of language and land rights. It's the small things that hurt the most. The white waitress who wouldn't take an order, Tonto, the Washington Redskins." - The Only Traffic Signal..."The television was always loud, too loud, until every emotion was measured by the half hour. We hid our faces behind masks that suggested other histories; we touched hands accidentally and our skin sparked like a personal revolution We stared across the room at each other, waited for the conversation and the conversion, watched wasps and flies battering against the windows. We were children; we were open mouths. Open in hunger, in anger, in laughter, in prayer. Jesus, we all want to survive." - Family Portrait10/10S: 6/1/17 - 6/20/17 (21 Days)
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sherman Alexie grew up on the Spoke Indian Reservation in Wellpinit Washington, near Spokane. He has written nearly 20 books of fiction, poetry, short stories, and has had a couple films made based on his work. One of those films, Smoke Signals, was based on this book.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto fistfight in Heaven.. This book is a series of shorts about living on or around the Res he grew up on. Every story is different, with ties linking back to each other. The characters know each other, though each story is told from the perspective of a different person.
The first story in the book, “Every little hurricane”, starts off with the description of a storm coming. You imagine a hurricane touching down in Washington state. The hurricane is not meteorological in nature, instead it is the fast moving storm of drunken violence that a child sees as his uncles fight drunkenly on the front lawn. The coming together of two forces of nature into an explosive and unstoppable swirling mess.
The movie Smoke signals was primarily based off the short story “This is what it means to say Phoenix, Arizona.” The story’s axis is Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Thomas is known as a story teller. He tells stories from his heart and soul. Everything has a tale to tell. some may not have happened, some are spiritual and will never be seen. Some of his narratives are visions of what he sees in others and how they would be had our world not decimated his.
The story begins when Victor learns that his father has died. His body is in Phoenix AZ and he enlists the help of Thomas to get to AZ to pick up his fathers ashes and belongings. Victor and Thomas have not been friends for many years. and there is tension between them. Victor needs his money to get there, but does not necessarily his company.
The Res is a tight community with everyone’s business hanging out in the open. Thomas was been sidelined from the other boys for most of his life due to his stories, so Victor is surprised to learn that Thomas has memories of his father. Victor asks him what he remembers about his father.
Excerpt
-Thomas Builds-the-Fire closed his eyes and told this story: “I remember when I had this dream that told me to go to Spokane, to stand by the Falls in the middle of the city and wait for a sign. I knew I had to go there but I didn’t have a car. Didn’t have a license. I was only thirteen. So I walked all the way, took me all day, and I finally made it to the Falls. I stood there for an hour waiting. Then your dad came walking up. What the hell are you doing here? he asked me. I said, Waiting for a vision. Then your father said, All you’re going to get here is mugged. So he drove me over to Denny’s, bought me dinner, and then drove me home to the reservation. For a long time I was mad because I thought my dreams had lied to me. But they didn’t. Your dad was my vision. Take care of each other is what my dreams were saying. Take care of each other.”
Every story is a piece of a life, fictional, based on reality, or fully factual.. Captured in it’s sorrow and happiness, excitement and dismay.
This book, much as others I have read of Alexie’s makes my heart ache. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I don't know how I made it through life not having read this book. It had a profound impact on me, the lyrical prose, beauty, heartbreak, and cultural awareness that this book brings is beyond impressive. A collection of short stories about growing up on the Spokane reservation and dealing with alcohol, corrupt government agencies, tradition, love, basketball, culture, and more. Some stories make you laugh but many more make you depressed. It's a book that demands to be felt and is wonderful in getting people to understand at least a little bit of the struggle that Native Americans deal with on a daily basis. Alexie is a gifted storyteller and weaves his words to create dozens of poetic and moving stories that readers will think about long after they finish the book. I can't wait to watch the movie adaptation, Smoke Signals. I hope it does the book justice!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I feel that this book had more to offer than what I could get out of it. There were things I definitely did not grasp fully. A definite reread.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven by Sherman Alexie was originally published in 1993 and the version I read was issued to celebrate it’s first 20 years. It includes an introduction by e-mails as Jess Walter and Sherman Alexie discuss the book and what it has come to mean. This is a collection of slightly dark, often humorous, at times extremely touching stories about life on an Indian Reservation north of Spokane, Washington.Perhaps because I have a slight knowledge of Spokane, the parts that are set in the seedy rundown sections of that town really resonated with me. But where Alexie shines is in bringing to light the thoughts and feelings of isolation that most Indians seem to feel in today’s world. These stories are built around the themes of poverty, alcoholism, and depression yet there is also a strong sense of community as well. Some of the happier stories are about carnivals, storytelling and basketball but underneath there is always the darkness of surviving as an Indian in today’s world. As a collection of short stories this is a thought-provoking, intelligent book. As a statement on Indians living on the Rez this book pulls back the curtains and shows what their life is all about. As both a writer and an Indian himself, Alexie does not leave his people without showing his compassion and his hope for them.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I read this for my American Indian History class and I liked it a lot. It was funny, sad, and moving in the way that Alexie always manages perfectly. It was a great collection of short stories that tells stories of a young boy, Victor, who lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is one of Alexie’s first publishing successes. It is a collection of inter-connected short stories. There are several recurring characters, though each story can easily stand alone. The stories focus on the Native American residents of the Spokane Indian Reservation. Thomas Builds-the-Fire is a storyteller who is frequently ignored, but is nevertheless compelled to relate his allegorical tales. Victor Joseph is another central character. We meet him in the first story as a nine-year-old trying to understand and save his parents from their alcohol dependence. Recurring themes include alcohol dependence, a desire to return to tradition, laughter shared with friends, the differences between reservation Indians and urban Indians, and, of course, basketball. Alexie began as a poet, and his writing reflects this. He has an ability to craft a phrase that will take your breath away.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Alexie has a voice that is unique. I trust that his stories provide insight into the life of Indians in the contemporary Pacific Northwest, but I have no way to know.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A story collection of interconnected tales focusing of many of Alexie’s memorable characters from his novels, this sometimes charming, sometimes depressing book gives insight into the desolate conditions of Native American life on the Spokane Indian reservation. Clever and insightful, the stories focus on the challenges of living when so many of his characters are limited by outside influences such as racism, government policies, and alcohol. Alexie’s sarcasm and wit shines through his characters as the hurt each other as much as they try to help each other. Readers will willingly delve into the history and familial relationships of the characters as Alexie describes journeys of recovery, disappointment, extreme poverty, love, and death. Surprisingly uplifting- though there are as many stories to cry about as there are to revel in, Alexie’s book should be on every conscientious high school student’s reading list.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I loved everything about this book. I loved every story. I loved the language, and I loved the tales told in the language. I liked that Alexie makes his magic, his transformations, work on a sentence-by-sentence level, and yet the whole story can be transformational, too. My favorite character is Thomas Builds-the-Fire, hero of the stories "A Drug Called Tradition," "This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona," and "The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire." He knows when to keep silent and when to speak, and when asked, "You don't really believe that shit?" he says, "Don't need to believe anything. It just is." Amen Thomas, Amen. And there's a very powerful story about Thomas's father in there, too, "A Train Is an Order of Occurrence Designed to Lead to Some Result." But there were other special stories, too: "Imagining the Reservation," which was poetry more than story, or the story of James in "Jesus Christ's Half-Brother Is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation," about a guy bringing up a baby, and then child, who fell from a great height in infancy and hit his head and doesn't talk--not at first, anyway. And then there's "A Good Story," where the story and the telling of it weave in themselves--it's a story told because the narrator's mother says, "You know, those stories you tell, they're kind of sad, enit?"--so he tells one that's happy, not sad.
So much love in these stories. Sorrow and anger, but most of all love. Great stuff. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book wasn't bad, just a little hard to take sometimes. It is a collection of short stories about, mostly, boys and men on the Spokane Indian Reservation. There are tales about growing up, surviving alcoholism, not surviving alcoholism, basketball and fighting. The most heartbreaking story for me was The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Thomas is a born story teller, he has been telling stories for years. Then one day he stopped telling stories, at least out loud. What happened next was shocking and heartbreaking.I liked the first book I read by Alexie but it was in novel format. If I read any more by him I'll stick with the novels.My biggest problem of this collection was that there seemed to be some common threads but it was hard to track them and I often lost track of which named character went with which stories.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Love love love Sherman Alexie and the way he tells stories about the power of words. Great mix of black comedy and heart-wrenching, but never cloying, social commentary. Highly recommend his work if you've never read it before.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ball players and magicians (of all kinds) populate the 24 stories (the latest edition includes 2 which were originally cut). Both professions require their top talents to make the impossible look easy, exactly what Alexie does in this thematically unified collection of short stories. His prose is deceptively approachable: more Hemingway than Faulkner (it is not surprising he won the Special Citation for the 1994 PEN/Hemingway Award for Best First Fiction). His words are precisely and carefully colloquial, the conversations so real you almost instantly forget you’re reading them and instead lean in to hear better. As in Hemingway, his characters partake of the sacraments of real life: in this case, fry bread and Diet Pepsi, whiskey and vodka, jokes and tears. Quickly calibrated to the rhythm of life on the Spokane Indian Reservation, we settle in for a captivating story of kids and adults in dire straits surviving and dreaming, but that’s just the beginning. Like a boy hopping from rock to rock down the bank of a river, sometimes teetering, jumping left, jumping right, backing up, Alexie touches on history, myth, fantasy, emotion, storytelling and pain without missing a beat, without an awkward segue, without falling off moss-covered boulders of race and racism; all the while making his way down the bank of the river to the edge of the falls where the story comes together and pours down into a dark deep pool of resonating truth. Before the reader is aware anything extraordinary has occurred, Alexie has pulled a Camaro out of their ear and launched them bodily cross-court in a multidimensional slam dunk, all in ten pages. And then you start the next story.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Full of beautiful and haunting imagery that serves to punctuate the stories of Native Americans which are more often ignored than noticed. Occasional bouts of laughter are mixed with sad truths. Alexie's work is marked by flowing realism. Here is a book that should not be ignored.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Like the character of Thomas the best.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I've read Sherman Alexie before, but this is going back in his writing history. It shows; the stories are more raw, which can be a good thing but also leaves plenty undone.
The pain of poverty and oppression of life on a reservation is more evident and his dry humour less so. Still, it's not one to miss. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5good, but i much prefer his absolutely true diary of part time indian. the illustrations and narrator's voice spoke to me more clearly.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bittersweet, often funny, vignettes about the harsh realities of life on the res.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A ten anniversary edition of Sherman Alexie’s first short story collection that focuses on the lives of Native Americans on a Spokane, Washington reservation. The book provides the reader with a sense of the importance of oral history to the traditions of Native American storytelling. The collection also exhibits how suffering is a constant presence in Native American lore as it is a constant presence in their daily lives. Another informative aspect of the work is that of magical realism—how it is not a technique employed by the storyteller, but rather inherently and inextricably ingrained in the culture, which is representative of the causes for conflict with characters from the white, dominant society.Wonderful collection.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5So what is reservation realism? Through the course of these twenty-four interconnected short stories you learn of life on the Spokane Indian Reservation and of the many Native Americans who call it home. Victor Joseph and his family and friends, like Thomas Builds-the-Fire are the narrative centers. The stories of the modern Indians are not very hopeful, and are drenched in alcoholism and all kinds of abuse. Despite these characters being the victims of circumstance, Sherman Alexie makes these stories easier to handle with humor and unforgettable characters.I’m usually a person who tries to block out reality and search for “happily ever afters,” but despite that I still loved this book. Alexie’s humorous voice and beautiful prose made this collection so dear to my heart. The characters in this book are searching for their different versions of happy and some might never get it, but that’s not stopping them from trying.One of my favorites from this book is the title story where Victor returns to the reservation from living in Seattle with his white girlfriend.The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is poetic and real. It’s the perfect Sherman Alexie book to start with, because once you read this one, you’ll want to read more.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I feel a bit mixed about this book, which is a collection of 22 connected short stories, some in first and some in third person. The book was on a list of recommended literary fiction. Picking it up, I realized that though I've read many a book by African Americans, several assigned in school, I couldn't recall ever reading a work of fiction by a Native American about Native Americans. I found myself jotting down the unfamiliar or recurring words and themes, wanting to learn more later: frybread, salmon, commodity cheese, alcoholism, diabetes, sweathouse, longhouse, HUD, fancydancing, owldancing, basketball, powwow, tipi, braids, ribbon shirt, five hundred years.That glimpse into another world, the world of the Spokane Indian Reservation, is a lot of what kept me reading, but I wondered at times when Alexie was giving us a look behind the stereotypes or playing with them. Especially given the touches of magical realism, I found myself wishing at times this was straight memoir and not (as admitted in the introduction) autobiographically inspired fiction.This is a very bleak book--so much of it dealt with drunkenness and alcoholism and the self-destructive behavior it engenders, sprinkled with historical grievance and the experience of present-day bigotry and a terrible poverty. The most upbeat tale in the book revolved around a terminally ill cancer patient: "The Approximate Size of My Favorite Tumor." Two of the other standouts for me were "Fun House," about a women who finally has had it with the behavior of her husband and son, and "Indian Education." Here's a quote from that story that stuck with me: The farm town high school I play for is nicknamed the "Indians," and I'm probably the only actual Indian ever to play for a team with such a mascot. This morning I pick up the sports page and read the headline: INDIANS LOSE AGAIN. Go ahead and tell me none of this is supposed to hurt me very much.I think that's a passage that captures a lot about the book. Clean, spare style, sometimes lyrical, spiked with a dark humor. I find myself dithering about the rating here. I don't know if it's a book that I can say I enjoyed, or one where the individual stories impressed--I think it's one where the whole is more than its parts, but the repeated (and repetitive) notes of hopelessness ground me down. However, the book did make me think and a time or two broke my heart a little, and I think it'll stay with me.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5First Line: Although it was winter, the nearest ocean four hundred miles away, and the Tribal Weatherman asleep because of boredom, a hurricane dropped from the sky in 1976 and fell so hard on the Spokane Indian Reservation that it knocked Victor from bed and his latest nightmare.The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a collection of short stories written by one of my favorite authors, Sherman Alexie. Alexie's writing can be very powerful and beautiful, and it has the added bonus of taking us out of our comfort zones and letting us see "how the other half lives" in the United States. Alexie is a Spokane Indian, and his writing has been formed in part by growing up on the reservation.Growing up in central Illinois, I had no clue about reservations, other than knowing that the governmental policy always seemed to be one of placing reservations on worthless pieces of land. It wasn't until I moved to Arizona and could drive to places like Chinle or Page that I realized that there are indeed countries within the United States. The Navajo Nation is a nation. It has its own police force, its own language, and-- unlike the rest of Arizona-- observes Daylight Savings Time. The trials many Navajo face just to have enough water for themselves and their livestock on a daily basis are trials that you and I would never put up with. We deserve better. (Hopefully I didn't lace that last bit with too much sarcasm.)We need writers like Alexie. Not only does he possess story-telling magic, he reminds us that we need to take off our rose-colored glasses from time to time and take a much closer look at America. There's work to be done. This collection of short stories contains the seeds of future films and books. It spans several years in his development as a writer, since some were written when he was nineteen: "So why am I telling you that these stories are true? First of all, they're not really true. They are the vision of one individual looking at the lives of his family and his entire tribe, so these stories are necessarily biased, incomplete, exaggerated, deluded, and often just plain wrong. But in trying to make them true and real, I am writing what might be called reservation realism."I would imagine that, if all writers were completely honest with us, they'd have to say that what they write is often biased, incomplete, exaggerated, deluded, and just plain wrong. Sometimes you need to do some (or all) of those things to get your point across. Although these stories aren't as strong as his novels Indian Killer or Flight (both of which blew me away), I'm glad I read these stories. They are good, and they show the evolution of a very gifted writer.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5These short stories are a mixture of tragedy, comedy, and very definitely, realism. They are a poignant look into the Native American culture that has been decimated by modern life and the loss of their old ways. At the same time, it is a look into the ties that bind and in spite of much of the dysfunctional lives we see, we yearn to have the same connection between family members and friends that are found in these stories.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A collection of short, extremely simple and clear stories - as Alexie's forward in the edition I read points out, these are almost like skeleton stories - bare bones, little description of physical attributes or places - which makes the characters shine through all the more clearly. The stories are collected and not chronological; you are hit with realizations throughout the book about who someone in a previous story was.The stories are engaging, and make you think, and stand out from the crowd a bit. I'd recommend them to everyone.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a collection of short stories set on a contemporary Indian reservation. The stories, loosely interconnected, focus on the lives of Victor, Junior, and Thomas Builds the Fire, weaving back and forth between childhoods marked by alcoholic parents and adulthoods of broken dreams. The collection is both a eulogy for a lost culture and a testament to the bleak lives awaiting the children of a broken people, but each story relates these themes in a unique way. Some of them are harsh and realistic, while others drift into fantasy, post-apocalyptic science fiction, and magic realism inspired by the legends of Native American culture. What ties the story together is the unique rhythm of Alexie's prose, coupled with a sense of humor that keeps these sad stories from becoming too depressing to read. This is a rare glimpse into a world too few of us see or understand, and it left an impression on me that I'm sure will linger for awhile.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is a collection of inter-related short stories, that all take place on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington. Alexie does a great job of evoking a very bittersweet atmosphere about the reservation, and as the same cast of characters are woven in and out of each of the stories, so we get a sense of their community and relationships and struggles.But the greatest conflicts in these stories aren't from relationships, but from the attempt to reconcile being an American Indian in a modern American culture that doesn't especially care about American Indians. They love and cling tight to their traditions, but also see the inevitable motions toward assimilation. And really, everything that they gained from assimilating is bad: alcoholism, homophobia, fathers walking out on their families and children. The book raises the question of what American Indians should be asking of America - or rather, what they *can* ask of America.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A series of 24 short stories of interwoven characters who reside on a Spokane Washington Indian reservation.Alexie is an incredible writer who paints vivid images of reality and poetry blended together.Many of the stories, while depressing, are also hopeful.There is a passion and a desperate attempt to make sense of the life of the American Indian, rich in past tradition trying to survive in the current modern world.Disinfranchized and living marginally, exisiting in substandard HUD housing, Alexie's stories combine the hope of better opportunities while paradoxically depicting lives filled with alcoholism and self imposed defeat.Alexie's writing is mythological in scope and I highly recommend this book.
Book preview
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven - Sherman Alexie
Prologue
An email exchange between Jess Walter and Sherman Alexie
From: Sherman Alexie
To: Jess Walter
Sent: Thursday, June 20
Subject: Twentieth Anniversary Lone Ranger and Tonto
SA: So I’ve been trying to write the intro to the 20th anniversary edition, but it feels too self-congratulatory, so do you want to have an email exchange about it and use that as the intro?
JW: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is 20!?! Your email sent me scurrying to my signed copy. I looked at the jacket photo and there you are, with the greatest Breakfast Club pro-wrestling warrior mullet of all time.
SA: The rez mullet! I also find my former haircut amusing in stylistic terms. It’s embarrassing now. But there’s always been a conscious and subconscious classist/racist edge to mullet jokes, especially when it comes to white guys with mullets. If one means to tell a racist/classist joke, then make it a good one, but I don’t actually think that many folks realize the cultural importance of the mullet in Native American warrior history. Take a look at Chief Joseph.
Unravel those braids, my friend, and you’ve got a legendary mullet, comparable to mine. The contemporary motto for the mullet wearer is business in front, party in the back,
but the Indian mullet warrior motto was I don’t want my hair to get in my eyes as I’m kicking your ass.
The Indian mullet motto, coincidentally or not, is the same as the motto for hockey mullet wearers. Somebody needs to do a study …
Looking at my hair through a slightly more serious lens, I think I wore such an exaggerated mullet as a means of aggressively declaring my Indian identity. And my class identity. When The Lone Ranger was published, I was being fêted by the publishing world while I was back living on the rez, after college. I was called one of the major lyric voices of our time
but at the same time I was sleeping in a U.S. Army surplus bed in the unfinished basement bedroom in my family’s government-built house.
The contrast between my literary life and my real life was epic. Scary. Even dangerous. And it felt epic, scary, and dangerous for many years.
My mullet was an insecurity shield. My mullet was an ethnic hatchet. My mullet was an arrow on fire.
My mullet said to the literary world, Hello, you privileged prep-school assholes, I’m here to steal your thunder, lightning, and book sales.
JW: Yes, undoubtedly: Chief Joseph’s business in front carries more power and meaning than say, Brian Bosworth’s. (My own unfortunate mullet included a braided rattail—just in case I wasn’t white trash enough.) And in your author photo from that time there is a fierce, steady engagement in your eyes that reflects exactly that quality in the book—you are drawn in by the humor, the sorrow, and the anger over injustice, the steady and unblinking cost of admission. I remember so clearly the reviews you were getting, and especially that phrase from the New York Times Book Review’s cover story on The Business of Fancydancing—one of the major lyric voices of our time
—but I couldn’t have comprehended the pressure that such praise brings, especially the identity component of it, and so early in your writing life. To follow those reviews with a book like Lone Ranger, is, frankly, kind of fucking remarkable. The book won the PEN/Hemingway Award for best first fiction and garnered even more praise, but it must have felt like even more weight; every writer dreams of stunning
and dazzling,
but The Chicago Tribune writing, "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is for the American Indian what Richard Wright’s Native Son was for the black American in 1940." What does a 26-year-old do with that?
The pressure of straddling two worlds comes through in Lone Ranger. In A Good Story,
the gap is represented by the sweetest bit of postmodernist breaking of the fourth wall, in which you, the author, seem to be lying on the couch and your mother pleads with you to write a story about something good.
Another example of the disparate worlds you’ve suddenly found yourself straddling is one of my all-time-favorite stories, The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire,
which begins with a wonderfully apt epigraph from Kafka’s The Trial: Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.
Your name, your boy’s name: Joseph. You almost seem to be staking out territory on the literary side of that divide, and having to defend yourself to both sides. That story also moves toward something I see in your work—a brotherhood in class, Thomas on the bus to prison with four African men, one Chicano, and a white man from the smallest town in the state,
delivering them to a new kind of reservation, barrio, ghetto, logging-town tin shack.
SA: And now I remember a New Yorker magazine party early in my career when I stepped out of a penthouse apartment elevator and saw Stephen King and Salman Rushdie hugging each other. What does a rez boy do with that visual information?
Oh boy, do I still feel like a class warrior in the literary world. In the whole world, really. These stories are drenched in poverty and helplessness.
We’ve talked about this a few times. I often make the joke that your trailer park poverty makes my rez poverty look good.
But that’s an overlooked part of these stories, I think. I grew up in the tribe called the Rural Poor, as did you, and I don’t think folks think of us that way. I grew up in wheat fields. I grew up climbing to the tops of pine trees. I grew up angry and ready to punch a rich guy in the ear.
So, yeah, realism is my thing in this book. Autobiography, too. Not an autobiography of details but an autobiography of the soul.
One thing: I wrote this book in the middle of a decade-long effort to believe in God. So it’s curious to see the uncynical God hunger in the boy I was.
JW: Oh man! That’s a little more high-powered hug than you and I hugging at the LA Times Book Festival in 1996. I still remember, you said, What are you doing here?
Then you introduced me to Helen Fielding, of all people. This is Jess Walter, the second-best writer from Stevens County, Washington.
And we both laughed, because you and I knew that I was the ONLY other writer from Stevens County, Washington.
To my shame now, I grew up embarrassed about being bluecollar, a first-generation college student, a 19-year-old father. We usually think of passing in terms of race, but people try to pass as another class, too. I did that.
You, however, seemed to know—at least as a writer—to claim class as a subject, that literature belongs to the poor shits, too. Your stories are sneaky that way: They confront readers on that level; there’s a quiet insistence that THIS WORLD is as rich a literary world as London or New York, that Benjamin Lake can be as profound a place as Walden Pond, that Tshimikain Creek can have every bit as much literary resonance as the Thames.
But place and class are only part of the story. Many people tell me that they had no picture of contemporary reservation life, or even urban Indian life, until reading The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. To break Indians out of museums and movies and Chief Wahoo—that’s a legacy for any book. The book and Smoke Signals gave many their first picture of contemporary Native American life.
Autobiography of the soul is a great phrase. I remember someone on the reservation telling me back when I covered the Spokane Tribe and your book came up, You know what that book seemed like to me? The news.
So, what do you make of people who have called your work magical realism
? I wonder if there isn’t a cultural gap in that phrase, a whiff of colonialism. I’m a big García Márquez fan and reading his autobiography is not so much different than reading his fiction.
SA: Describing my book as magical realism
does make me feel like a witch doctor in blue jeans. I’ve got a friend who calls me Shaman Perplexy. I like that. Isn’t all fiction (and nonfiction) magical realism? Aren’t we all making shit up, and if we do it well enough, it can feel surreal? Anyway, I’m not nearly as much of a magical realist as Flannery O’Connor.
What is your favorite story in the book?
JW: What feels surreal to me are those stories of kids growing up on the Upper East Side, going to summer camp, then prep school, then choosing between Harvard and Yale … sci-fi.
Jesus Christ’s Half-Brother …
is a huge story, dreamy and plaintive. I’m not surprised to hear you were contemplating your faith as you worked on this book. I have a sentimental sweet spot for the stories about basketball, especially Indian Education
and The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore.
One of my favorite first lines is from The First Annual All-Indian Horse Shoe Pitch and Barbecue
: Somebody forgot the charcoal; blame the BIA.
But I think the story that moved me the most at the time was This Is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona.
When I went back to that story, I was amazed you accomplished all of that in 16 pages. That story was a novel in my mind.
Jess Walter is the author of eight books, including the bestseller Beautiful Ruins and The Zero, a finalist for the National Book Award. He grew up in Spokane and on a small ranch bordering the Spokane Reservation. He and Sherman Alexie have been friends for twenty years.
Introduction
IN FEBRUARY 1992 Hanging Loose Press of Brooklyn, New York, published my first book of poems and stories, The Business of Fancydancing, and I figured it would sell two hundred copies, one hundred and twenty-five of them purchased by my mother. After all, it was a first book by a twenty-six-year-old Spokane Reservation Indian boy from eastern Washington. There was a good chance it would only sell twenty-two copies, seventeen of them purchased by my mother, the formalist, who constantly asked me why my poems didn’t rhyme.
It’s free verse,
I said. And some of them do rhyme. I’ve written sonnets, sestinas, and villanelles. I’ve written in iambic pentameter.
What’s that?
"It’s the ba-bump, ba-bump sound of the heartbeat, of the deer running through the green pine forest, of the eagle singing its way through the sky."
Don’t pull that Indian shaman crap on me,
my mother said.
So my mother certainly wasn’t impressed by my indigenous rhetoric, but she would have been deliriously happy if I’d become a messianic doctor or lawyer (or a doctor or lawyer with only a messiah complex) and saved the tribe. In a capitalistic sense, that’s what the tribe needed (and still needs). But I was a former premedicine major who couldn’t handle human anatomy, and I knew far too many lawyers, so I chose the third most lucrative pursuit: small-press poetry.
My family was surprised, but they weren’t disappointed. Since I was one of the few people from my tribe to ever go to college, I was already a success story. My mother worked a series of low-wage social-work jobs for the tribe, and my father was a randomly employed blue-collar alcoholic. I made more money delivering pizzas than they did while working far more important jobs. I might have been considered a black sheep if I’d come from a more financially successful family, but my literary ambitions made me a white sheep, albeit a lamb who published in tiny poetry magazines like The Black Bear Review, Giants Play Well in the Drizzle, Impetus, and Slipstream.
Don’t get me wrong. I was excited and proud to be a publishing poet (and still have copies of every journal where I’ve been published), but I also kept my day job as a program information coordinator (secretary) for People to People, a high school international-exchange program in Spokane. I knew that I would eventually return to college (I left three credits shy of my B.A. in American studies), get that degree, and then trudge through graduate school in creative writing. But I was in no hurry to do that. I just wanted to write my poems (and the occasional story) and live as cheaply as possible. I knew how to live in poverty, having grown up on an American third-world reservation, so my urban six-dollars-an-hour job was almost luxurious.
But a New York Times Book Review editor named Rich Nicholls changed my life when he noticed The Business of Fancydancing lying in an office slush pile. As he later told me, he thought the cover was extraordinarily beautiful—it featured a surreal photograph of a Navajo fancydancer that some readers wrongly assumed was my self-portrait—and that was the primary reason he picked it up and flipped through the pages. He assigned the book, as well as a few others as part of a survey of contemporary Native American literature, to James Kincaid, an English professor at the University of Southern California. My Hanging Loose editors were shocked to hear one of their books was being reviewed, because there are Pulitzer Prize–winning poets whose books don’t get covered in the Times. And more shocking, my book was part of a front-page review. Yep, right there on the cover of the Times Book Review was a photograph of some Indian guy on a motorcycle (I’m terrified of any vehicle with less than four wheels), and inside that review was Mr. Kincaid declaring me one of the major lyric voices of our time.
I was sitting at my desk at People to People when my Hanging Loose editor, Bob Hershon, faxed me an advance copy of the review. I read it once, ran to the bathroom to throw up, then returned to my desk to read one sentence again and again: Mr. Alexie’s is one of the major lyric voices of our time.
As Keanu Reeves, the Hawaiian balladeer, would say, Whoa.
I didn’t believe I was one of the major lyric voices of our time (though I’m probably in the top 503 by now), but I guessed that review was going to help my career. In fact, that review tossed my ass over the stadium fence directly into the big leagues. After Kincaid’s compliments went public, I started receiving phone calls from agents and editors. Many phone calls. Dozens of calls. A Hollywood producer interrogated me.
Are the film rights available?
he asked.
Well, yeah,
I said. But you know it’s a book of poems?
What do you mean, a book of poems?
I mean, poems, you know, with skinny lines, stanzas, mostly free verse, but some rhyming stuff, too. My mom thinks they’re pretty cool.
You mean poem poems?
Yes.
Do your poems tell a story?
Most of them are narrative.
That’s good, that’s good. Could you send me a copy of the book?
You haven’t read it?
No,
he said. But I read the review. The review was great.
Dozens of agents and editors loved the review (though I wonder how many of them had read the book), and they all wanted to know if I wrote fiction.
Well,
I said to them. It’s not just a book of poetry. There are four short stories in there, too. And a lot of prose poems.
But do you write fiction?
I have a manuscript of short stories. There must be thirty or forty stories in it.
But do you write fiction?
I didn’t realize that fiction
was a synonym for Sure, we’ll publish your book of obscure short stories as long as we can also publish your slightly less obscure first novel as part of a two-book deal.
I was terrified by all of these big-time agents and editors, and especially of one particular agent, who enjoyed more fame and fortune than any of her clients did.
Send me the manuscript today,
the famous agent ordered.
Bullied, terrified, and naive, I sent her my manuscript of short stories, glacially printed out by a five-hundred-dollar Brother word processor.
You’re not ready,
she said after she’d read them. I’ll take you on as a client, but we’re going to have to work on these stories for a year or two before I send them out to publishers.
I was shocked. I had been dreaming about immediate fame and fortune.
But wait,
I said. I thought I was one of the major lyric voices of our time.
According to the manuscript I’ve got sitting in front of me, you’re not even one of the major lyric voices on my desk.
Ouch. That one really hurt. And this woman wanted to be my agent? Was that how agents were supposed to talk to their clients? And who the hell was I, calling myself one of the major lyric voices of our time? I was wondering if I should get business cards that identified me as such, or perhaps leave it on my answering machine.
Hello, you’ve reached Sherman Alexie, one of the major lyric voices of our time. Please leave a message if you’re not too intimidated and I’ll get back to you, with my versatile and mellifluous voice, as soon as possible.
Of course, these days my wife, Diane, only refers to me as one of the major lyric voices of our time
when I stutter or mispronounce a word or say something so inane and arrogant that it defies logic. A few years ago, as we argued about the potential danger in using a cracked coffeepot, I shouted, You can’t heat cracked glass! It will shatter! I majored in chemistry! I know glass! What do you know about glass?
Yep, I have just offered you scientific proof of the majorness of my voice.
But the thing is,
I said to the famous agent. I think my stories are pretty good. And I hate to be repetitive, but they said I’m one of the major lyric voices of our time.
These stories are not major. But you’ve got potential. I’m a great editor. If we take it slow, we can make this book the best it can be.
I don’t know,
I said. I was hoping things would go much faster.
Going fast would be a mistake for you.
I don’t want to go slow. I can’t afford to go slow.
Then we won’t be working together. Call me if you change your mind.
She hung up without saying good-bye. I’d always heard of people who hung up without saying good-bye. I’d seen them on television and in