On my travels recently I picked up a copy of Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues, his first novel, about an all-Indian Catholic rock band called Coyote Springs. Having been enchanted by his book of short stories, Ten Little Indians, I expected more of the same. But this is a very different book. A novel. A very young novel, reminding me of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, which in its youthful enthusiasms and rebellious restlessness almost led to the demise of my marriage (which lasted only a few years more and, like Augie, I did make the Mexico trek later). Both these books are sometimes highly comic attempts to make sense of the complex world we live in.
At the beginning I didn’t think I was going to like Reservation Blues. It seemed at first inconsistent, drifting into reverie, dreams, narrative, newspaper clips, poems, songs. But after a couple of chapters I was able to get into the rhythm and style of the storytelling and really appreciated the view of Indian reservation life from the inside, something I could never have known about with this intensity without hearing it from someone who had been there.
There are some probing sections about God and indifference. As one of the female singers in the band ponders:
Can God be broken into pieces like a jigsaw puzzle? What if it’s like one of those puzzles that Indian kids buy at secondhandstores? You put it together and find out one or two pieces are missing.I looked at Big Mom and thought that God must be made up mostly of Indian and woman pieces. Then I looked at Father Arnold and thought that God must be made up of white and man pieces. I don’t know what’s true.
This intimate view of reservation life , where alcoholism, hunger, and the intense impact of Christianity and the white man’s culture is painfully expressed in these words: “The old Indian women dipped wooden spoons into stews and stirred and stirred. The stews made of random vegetables and commodity food, of failed dreams and predictable tears.”
Yet the main characters are searching for reality and fulfilment and move on and into the world in a humorous and affirmative way, making the book a positive experience, well worth the read.