“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. But the reservation still possessed power and rage, magic and loss, joys and jealousy. 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.” This riff began with a conversation about a father. “Where’s your dad now?” “He’s gone.”I was a long time getting to Alexie’s well-praised and wonderful first novel and I regret the delay. Like the world described in the film “Down by Law,” it is a sad but beautiful novel, at times funny and hopeful and at other times tragic with the weight of history. Alexie writes beautiful prose, adept at realism and a kind of mystical spirituality. He can even pull off bringing bluesman Robert Johnson into this tale of a Spokane Indian rock and roll band. The dialogue is briskly colorful. The characters are rich and varied—from the band members to Big Mom, a mythic music teacher whose tutees included, among others, Elvis and Janis and Jimi but decidedly not Jim Morrison (who wasn’t welcomed alive, nor is he welcome since he died) and Father Arnold, the local Catholic priest. “A prayer,” Alexie writes, “and a joke often sound alike on the reservation.”There are pleasures subtle and blunt—for the latter, record company executives that share the names of 19th century Indian fighting generals. The band’s name is Coyote Springs. Its lead singer and the book’s protagonist is Thomas Builds-the-Fire. Before founding the band, he is an outcast story-teller, whose extemporaneous stories entertain some and infuriate others. One of the running gags is the universal law that the lead singer must be the band leader, recognized as such by all authorities: local bar owners, hotel clerks, booking managers, native and white police. He is also the band’s songwriter, and writes Native American blues-based songs.Coyote Springs has a complicated relationship of love and hate with their reservation, which loves and loathes them. They have, with the help of Robert Johnson (it is his guitar that Victor, the band’s lead guitarist, plays with sudden ferocity and imagination) and Big Mom, a shot at the big time with Cavalry Records. The novel’s plot builds toward their New York audition and whether the band will last long enough to make the trip and how they will fare should they survive to travel to their audition.Alexie is frank about poverty, alcoholism, suicide—its prevalence and its root causes—on the Spokane reservation, as well as the schizophrenic stereotypical views of whites towards Indians, the contemporary versions of the Noble Savage and just plain savage dichotomy. Reservation Blues is imaginative, earthy, true. Alexis is a unique voice in American letters.
I am very disappointed as I write this review. At first, I was disappointed in myself because I could not, did not, will not finish this book. I wanted to, believe me. Oh, there was internal struggle. I mean, I need to read this; it's this month's pick for the book club I'm in. I need to be able to discuss this. Plus, I loved--loved--Alexie's Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian. It's on my "guaranteed you'll love it too" list, for crying out loud. Speaking of which, Alexie's other YA novel Flight made me cry out loud. The ending of that book was beautiful! So, yes, I went into reading Reservation Blues with high hopes.RB did not pull me in right away as I wanted it to. I kept on. I tried. But Alexie glossed over certain parts and waxed poetic on others. As I tried to get into the story and failed, I felt awful knowing I was not going to finish the book. What a terrible reader I am, I thought. I have no discipline. I'm a lazy reader (my niece has told me so and she's right).But then I started to get mad at Alexie. He'd go on and on about some dream sequence and then another dream. God, these characters dream a lot! And it was like he was going: Here's this for you to read and THIS, but that? Oh, you want to read about that? and he threw a couple adjectives at THAT and called that scene done. And I'm the one feeling lazy?!?So I quit. One third of the way in and I'm moving on to another book. I won't be finishing RB although I may pick up another book by ol' Sherman in the future. But you can bet that I'll expect him to draw me in within the first chapter. Just as I expect the next novel I pick up to do.Oh, it'll be formulaic drivel, but it'll describe THIS and THAT.
What do You think about Reservation Blues (2005)?
I don't know what I was expecting when I picked this up. I had read some of Alexie's short fiction anthologies and enjoyed them. Upon moving to Seattle and finding out that he was a local, I picked this up at a used book store, figuring I'd give it a read. I did not expect Thomas-builds-the-fire to get under my skin and change my life. Yet somehow he did.I grew up a stone's throw from the Southern Ute and Navajo reservations. I had friends from both tribes through most of my public school years. Yet I had never understood what it was to be a Native American. "Reservation Blues" made me realize that I may never fully understand, but gave me new eyes to help me at least see.Truly one of the best novels I've ever read - perhaps because it was the perfect time of my life to read it, perhaps for other reasons. But there are few books that compare in my experience for capturing a generous slice of humanity in a very true manner.
—Nathan
In Sherman Alexie’s RESERVATION BLUES, dreams, nightmares, and the blues intertwine as we witness the rise and fall of Coyote Springs, an all-Indian rock band from the Spokane Indian Reservation in Washington State. Zany comedy is scattered throughout—even in the darkest of times. Alexie paints a vivid picture of Indian life on the res with a taste of commodity applesauce and powdered milk, run-ins with Tribal cops, transactions at the Trading Post, a fling with the Catholic priest, and the sounds of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Elvis. The band starts and ends with its lead singer Thomas-Builds-the-Fire who holds his bandmates together through drunk performances, controversies involving sexual relations with white women, and even a crazy audition in New York City for Cavalry Records. Ultimately, Thomas is unable to save them all from what is haunting them, but is able to move forward toward the future hanging “tightly to the manes of those shadow horses running alongside” them. (Elvira, C-D)
—Evanston Public Library
I really wanted to like this, but didn't. I saw Smoke Signals many years ago and remember thinking it was pretty cool, but clearly Alexie is better as screenplays and short stories - what he's more known for I guess anyway - then novels. This really read more like a bunch of short stories. Interesting characters, but the story is almost all allegory rather than plot or character development. Lots of dream scenes. Lots of conspicuous social commentary. Important topics, but doesn't make for a very interested novel. I liked it enough to finish it, but that's about it.
—Dana
