The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven Review

I want to press a copy of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight In Heaven by Sherman Alexie into the arms of my good friends. This book is comprised of vignettes pertaining to reservation life, which though often bleak has an undercurrent of hope. There are 22 stories which weave together to form a portrait of what life may be like for the Spokanes. Life is peppered with poverty, alcoholism, basketball, music and dancing. Certainly, there are universal themes within this book.

The characters are vivid and three-dimensional. They have their strengths and their flaws. Alcoholism is rather a prevalent flaw for many of the characters. I don't particularly find the alcoholism offensive, as it is unfortunately the number one health problem for Native Americans, so props to Alexie for not painting Native Americans as mystical creatures, but as real people with real problems.

I think the prose within this book is gorgeous. It's simple, yet illustrates hard truths. I just want to quote the whole book for you. However, I will settle by showing you my favorite quotes.

"I guess every song has a special meaning for someone somewhere. Elvis Presley is still showing up in 7-11 stores across the country, even though he's been dead for years, so I figure music just might be the most important thing there is." - pg. 29

Again, music is so universal. I love how true this rings to me, and how much it reminds me of some people I know who are truly passionate about music.

"In the outside world, a person can be a hero one second and a nobody the next....A reservation hero is a hero forever. In fact, their status grows over the years as the stories are told and retold." pg. 48

The prevalence of hope, sunshine in a place of bleakness...

"Once, he owned a black-and-white television. He thought everything was much clearer then. Color complicated even the smallest events." - pg. 87

I just loved the way this was written. Maybe, not a huge special meaning, but to me, lovely writing.

"Thomas looked at these five men who shared his skin color, at the white man who shared this bus which was going to deliver them into a new kind of reservation, barrio, ghetto, logging-town tin shack." - pg. 103

Poverty is universal, no matter your background, the man is there to keep you down. I know, I know, bleeding hearts and all, but honestly, poverty does suck a lot.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven Overview

In this darkly comic short story collection, Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian, brilliantly weaves memory, fantasy, and stark realism to paint a complex, grimly ironic portrait of life in and around the Spokane Indian Reservation. These twenty-two interlinked tales are narrated by characters raised on humiliation and government-issue cheese, and yet are filled with passion and affection, myth and dream. There is Victor, who as a nine-year-old crawled between his unconscious parents hoping that the alcohol seeping through their skins might help him sleep, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, who tells his stories long after people stop listening, and Jimmy Many Horses, dying of cancer, who writes letters on stationary that reads "From the Death Bed of Jimmy Many Horses III," even though he actually writes then on his kitchen table. Against a backdrop of alcohol, car accidents, laughter, and basketball, Alexie depicts the distances between Indians and whites, reservation Indians and urban Indians, men and women, and mostly poetically between modern Indians and the traditions of the past.

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