‘Reservation’ Aspirations Alexie’s First Novel Engaging, But Takes On A Few Too Many Themes

“Reservation Blues” By Sherman Alexie (Atlantic Monthly Press, 306 pages, $21)

As a poet, Sherman Alexie seldom, if ever, uses perfect quatrains. Rhymed couplets? Forget it. And you’re about as likely to catch him penning a “doth” or a “wouldst” as you are an ode to a Grecian urn.

Instead, Alexie writes about the tangible objects of his earlier life: commodity cheese and warm beer, food stamps and dead ponies, fry bread and fast-break basketball, house fires and Crazy Horseless dreams.

Far from being precious, these objects are vital to an understanding of Alexie and the reservation world into which he was born. And when he’s at his best, Alexie is able to convert these objects of his life into art. Then his work surpasses the limits of mere prose and indeed becomes the essence of pure contemporary poetry.

In his first notable published effort, “The Business of Fancydancing,” Alexie wrote of a basketball “falling in-/to that moment between/ a father and forgive-/ness, between the hands reach-/ing up and everything/ they can possibly hold.”

Hear the pain there? That feeling, so often masked by humor, underscores the power of Alexie’s words. As a personal reaction to the effects of a centuries-old and ongoing policy of Indian mistreatment, it fuels his creative fire with focused rage. The resulting combination, communicated through his talent for picking just the right words, has helped Alexie earn a national reputation.

In the last couple of years, Alexie, who is just 28, has turned his talents more toward prose. Particularly toward long narrative. And it would be gratifying to be able to report that his first novel succeeds every bit as well as his shorter fiction and poetry.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. For while there is much to like about “Reservation Blues,” the book suffers from many of the problems typical of first efforts.

An obvious attempt at South American-style magical realism, “Reservation Blues” tells the story of a blues band born on the Spokane Indian Reservation. True to a tradition best-defined by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, Alexie blends fantasy with fiction by making the real-life, legendary bluesman Robert Johnson one of his characters.

In “Reservation Blues,” Johnson hasn’t died, as he actually did in 1938 at the hands (one version has it) of a jealous woman. In Alexie’s view, Johnson, having cheated the entity he refers to only as “the Gentleman,” has hidden out ever since.

He shows up on the reservation one day, looking for the holy woman everyone calls Big Mom. But before he meets her, Johnson bequeaths his guitar to the reservation story-teller-cum-punching-bag Thomas Builds-the-Fire.

Caught in the guitar’s strange spell, Thomas is led to form the band for which he writes the songs and serves as lead singer. The name he comes up with amounts to a perfect Indian pun: Coyote Springs.

Thomas convinces two of his childhood tormentors, Victor Joseph and Junior Polatkin, to join him and, eventually, they hire a pair of back-up singers, the lovely sisters Chess and Checkers Warm Water. After attracting a reservation following, Coyote Springs begins to play regionally and, ultimately, gets a chance to go national.

But all along they face problems. The guitar, which has haunted Johnson since he went into hiding, offers a variation of black magic: In the hands of Victor, it allows him to make music like a god. But, too, it makes him pay for the privilege with bloody fingers and a bruised soul.

As the band gains popularity off the reservation, it arouses resentment on it. Former friends act like strangers, while enemies delight in conspiring against these upstarts who, because they leave home, are resented for seeking something better than HUD housing and white-bread-and-bologna sandwiches.

Then, too, there is the internal dissension. Victor and Junior struggle with their alcoholic tendencies as much as they do their fellow band members. Checkers struggles with her love/lust for a Catholic priest and all he represents. Thomas and Chess struggle with their burgeoning love affair as well as their respective insecurities.

And, of course, don’t forget the inevitable problems with record promoters. The names of the two who court Coyote Springs hint at the band’s ultimate chances of success: George Wright and Phil Sheridan of Cavalry Records.

While following all these plotlines, Alexie tries to balance the elements of comedy and drama. And as is his way, he does come up with some fairly humorous scenes.

As the band is waiting at the Spokane International Airport for its flight to New York, Alexie writes: “The crowd at the gate stared at Coyote Springs. They worried those loud dark-skinned people might be hijackers. Coyote Springs did their best not to look middle eastern.”

Humorous, too, is his repeated use of magically realistic hyperbole, as in how the band reluctantly ends up accepting its name. After Victor insults Coyote, Alexie writes, “Lightning fell on the reservation right then, and a small fire started down near the Midnight Uranium Mine. Coyote stole Junior’s water truck and hid it in the abandoned dance hall at the powwow grounds. The truck was too big for the doors, so nobody was sure how that truck fit in there.”

The book’s problems, though, are equally evident. For one thing, Alexie continually disrupts his narrative flow with newspaper stories, journal accounts, radio interviews, song lyrics and even a job resume. Only the lyrics add anything substantial to the book’s overall meaning.

Most of the characters are familiar Alexie creations, from Thomas to Simon (who drives his car only in reverse) to tribal chairman (and self-important jerk) David WalksAlong. Of them, only Thomas has anything new to say.

But the main problem is not in what Alexie has left out of “Reservation Blues” but what he has insisted on packing in it. Instead of paring down his novel to a few well-stated themes, and weaving a narrative around those themes with the poetic imagery of which he is capable, Alexie writes as if this will be his one and only novel.

The result is a book that tries to deal with too many things at once: too many characters, too many prose styles, too many subplots, too many historical tragedies, too many shifts in tone, too many social issues (from racism to sexism, substance abuse to political chicanery) and even too many endings.

The ironic aspect to “Reservation Blues” is that its main strength comes from the same source as its weaknesses. For whatever its faults, the book is filled with the same fire that has fueled Alexie’s work from the beginning: a desire to right past wrongs, an intent to uncover the truth now, a hope that justice one day will work for everyone.

As a confused Thomas Builds-the-Fire asks Chess Warm Water, “So what are we supposed to do?”

“Sing songs and tell stories,” she answers. “That’s all we can do.”

And, we can only hope, will do again.

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