However, comparable to Lame Deer's narrative, the subtle and sophisticated arrangement of materials belies the simple language. Readers who enter Sherman Alexie's literary house must be wide-awake and ready for new experiences. His 1993 book of stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven , and 1992 book of poetry and stories, The Business of Fancydancing , blend fiction and poetry, fiction and autobiography. They detail reservation life and language in a way no other writer does. Most of the million or two Indians in the U.S. do not live on reservations as homelands, places where cultures and languages are kept.
Reservations differ from one another as well.
The Spokane Reservation, as Alexie describes it, has poverty, malnutrition, generations of alcoholics, disease, gross unemployment, a large welfare roll, poor education, hopelessness, beatings and murder, self-destructiveness in various forms. We've heard this before but never in so much detail or in so many authentic reservation voices cussing, dreaming, deceiving themselves, imagining, storytelling, and forgiving. One way to see Alexie's Lone Ranger is as a large tapestry with different characters caught in motion but waiting for something to happen. The motions themselves are cynical and repetitive. The tapestry is viewed by the ancestors who laugh at both Indians and whites.