The Toughest Indian in the World (Sherman Alexie)

Genre: Short stories
Year Published: 2000

I like to think of myself as a savvy shopper. I found The Toughest Indian in the World at a secondhand shop and recognized Sherman Alexie as a much-lauded poet, so I threw it into my pile of books to purchase. (My local secondhand shop is the best in Pennsylvania, so I will often come out with an armload of books and a gap in my wallet where a $20 bill used to be. When books are a buck apiece, I'm not that picky about exactly what I'm getting.) When I got home, I realized it wasn't poetry. But Alexie's opening paragraphs grabbed me, so I kept reading, assuming it was a novel.

Well, I got to the end of the first story and realized it wasn't a novel either. But it was an excellent story, so I kept reading, and I'm glad I did.

I happen to live in one of the five states in the country with the smallest percentage of the American Indian population, so I have absolutely no personal experience with Indians. That being the case, this book was, besides being entertaining, educational for me. All of Alexie's stories center around being Indian (that's his nomenclature, and I refuse to P.C.-ify the man's work) in modern-day America. Most, though not all, of his stories involve sex, and they're all about love, in their own peculiar ways. They're also about the difficulties that Indians face -- racism, interracial relationships, assimilation, enormously high death rates for Indian teens, the encroachment of Christianity, disproportionate rates of alcoholism and diabetes -- but now that I've written that whole list out, I'm afraid I've made it sound like an "issues" book that sacrifices plot for message. That's not at all the case. Alexie sketches great characters and great dialogue for those characters, and these stories are first and foremost about the characters. Indian issues are simply the backdrop for the prose.

The centerpiece of the book is a story, the longest of the bunch, called "The Sin Eaters." It is the only story in the pack that ventures past realism into a sort of sci-fi surrealism, but it is probably my favorite of the collection. As far as I'm concerned, the story is the answer to the question, "What would be the modern-day equivalent of the Trail of Tears?" (It's not a happy story, as you may have guessed.)

The other stories are much more concerned with the everyday -- especially the last, "One Good Man," the most touching one in the collection, written in the first person by a middle-aged Indian man whose father's feet are amputated because of diabetes complications. It's the only story in the bunch that reads as though it could be autobiographical -- though it's not the only one in first person -- and it's a fitting way to end the book, with this possible peek, perhaps false, into Alexie's own life.

Recommended? Yes.