Volume 47, Number 12 · July 20, 2000
Haunted by Salmon
By Joyce Carol Oates
The Toughest Indian in the World
by Sherman Alexie
Atlantic Monthly, 229 pp., $24.00
What is an Indian? runs through Sher-man Alexie's second collection of short stories, The Toughest Indian in the World, like a demented, demanding mantra. In these nine stories, irony is sounded like the tribal drums of the ghost musicians of the story 'Saint Junior' that haunt the Spokane Indian Reservation. ('Irony, a hallmark of the contemporary indigenous American.') Alexie, best known for his novels Reservation Blues and Indian Killer, is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian educated at Gonzaga University and Washington State University, a funny, irreverent, sardonic but sentimental, rebellious postmodernist voice set beside his elder and conspicuously more writerly and 'spiritual' Native American contemporaries N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich. Sherman Alexie is the bad boy among them, mocking, self-mocking, unpredictable, unassimilable, reminding us of the young Philip Roth whose controversial works of fiction 'The Conversion of the Jews' and Portnoy's Complaint outraged an older generation for whom anything Jewish had to be sacrosanct.
Review, 1383 words
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