The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

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Title: The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven
Author: Sherman Alexie
Publication Year: 1993
Pages: 223
Genre: Fiction, Short Stories
Count for Year: 37

I didn’t realize when I picked up this book that I was semi-familiar with it. One of the stories from this collection, “This is What It Means To Say Phoenix, Arizona,” was used to form the main story of the 1998 movie Smoke Signals, for which Alexie also wrote the screenplay. (He also interspersed ideas from other stories in this collection throughout the movie.) However, once I began the first story, “Every Little Hurricane,” and encountered a character named Victor as in the movie, then continued with the second story, “A Drug called Tradition,” and encountered a character named Thomas Builds-the-Fire also as in the movie, something began to click.

Another thing I didn’t realize when I picked up this book was that it was a collection of short stories. I thought it was a novel, even after reading in his biography on the book jacket this little tidbit: “His first novel is due out from Atlantic Monthly Press in 1994.” I thought to myself, “What are they talking about? Isn’t this his first novel?” Since I thought it was a novel and not short stories, I was trying to think of it as a story that followed a typical plot progression, or if not a typical plot progression, at least, some kind of plot progression. So when it began jumping from place to place and mixing characters in a way I thought was illogical, and didn’t match up with my memory of the movie, I didn’t like it. I thought well, this is actually his first novel and he can be excused for the jarring, or even at times lack of, transitions.

Now that I know this is a collection of short stories, I might would judge the book a little bit differently than when I first read it. Even though he does jump from place to place and mixes characters in a way that is inconsistent with the plot of a novel, in the world of short stories, he paints a holistic picture of the modern Native American. He or she is a person caught between the modern and ancient ways of life, who is often trying to reconcile those ways within himself or herself and often fails, because neither are they compatible nor should they be.

So while originally, I was going to downgrade the book a couple of notches in my “final analysis”, because it didn’t seem to flow like a novel should, now I’m going to take it up a notch and in my:

Final Analysis: I will give it a 9 out of 10. I still don’t think it was perfect, but it was a damned sight better now that I know it’s a short story collection and not a novel.

Bonus: A scene from Smoke Signals

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Tags: book review, Books, Sherman Alexie, short stories, Smoke Signals