Reservation Blues

Reservation Blues is the book where Sherman Alexie figured out he could be a novelist as well as a poet and a short story writer, and it remains, decades later, one of the most distinctive debuts of its decade. The premise sounds like something you would workshop and then talk yourself out of: Robert Johnson, the legendary bluesman who supposedly sold his soul at the crossroads, walks into the Spokane Indian Reservation alive in 1992 and hands his guitar to a young man named Thomas Builds-the-Fire.

What Thomas and his friends do with the guitar is form a band called Coyote Springs, and what Alexie does with the band is write a novel about ambition and addiction and the specific economics of being Native on a reservation in the early 90s. The humor is sharp. The sadness is sharper. The songs that punctuate the chapters are quoted at length in a way that should not work in fiction and somehow does.

Alexie has been a complicated figure in the years since, for reasons that are well documented and that I will not pretend do not matter. The book itself remains an extraordinary piece of writing, and I think the right way to talk about it is to take it seriously as both achievement and historical document. Five stars for the novel on its own terms.