[In the following review, Penner comments on Alexie's exploration of the struggle for American-Indian cultural identity as experienced by the characters in The Toughest Indian in the World.]

The protagonists of these nine stories [in The Toughest Indian in the World] are all proud to be Indians but hardly comfortable, or even quite sure what it means. “What is an Indian?” is a question asked over and over, either implicitly or in just those words.

What indeed? These aren't Hemingway's Indians, drunks freezing to death at the roadside. Sherman Alexie's Spokanes and Coeur d'Alenes, uncomfortably half-assimilated, tend to be fiercely intellectual (one insists that cars deserve love—specifically, agape) and as witty as stand-up comics. At the same time, they long to be warriors, comparing their own tribulations to those of Geronimo, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.

Being Indian in America is not, for them, an easy condition. Race shapes their entire lives, including the search for love. One protagonist submits to anal intercourse with “the toughest Indian in the world” in order to fire his own tepid ethnicity. Another tries to make peace between a white lesbian friend and the angry parents of her Indian lover. A third, tired of his white wife, goes to an Indian bar to connect with “his people” but gets beaten up for being too “urban.” That reproof is among many these stories deliver to incomplete Indians. One part-Indian academic is vain about his activism. He was on the line at Alcatraz, on the line at Wounded Knee. But he's easily one-upped by a reservation full-blood—a man endowed, for added measure, with “a one-hundred-percent guaranteed, American Indian, aboriginal, First Nations, indigenous penis”—who tells him, “You might be a Native American but you sure as hell ain't Indian.”

Whites come off even worse. Though particular people are often O.K., these stories exude racial distaste: “Indians just like to believe that white people will vanish, perhaps explode into smoke, if they are ignored enough times.” The sympathetic reader will likely find this anger justified. The justification, unfortunately, rarely appears within the story, depending instead on the reader's stock of pre-existing beliefs.

For example, consider this measured protest: “At ball games, in parking lots, and especially in airports, white men demanded to receive the privileges whose very existence they often denied.” Nicely put—and we may agree. But if we do, it's because we thought so before we began reading. The stories don't earn their claims. Instead, they ride the back of received opinion.

Sometimes anger escapes measure, swelling into paranoid visions. Soldiers parachute onto all the reservations in America. They abduct children and force them down many flights of stairs to a prison beneath the earth. There a young boy is brutalized, strapped face down to a table, and fitted with a hood. Sadistic doctors draw marrow from his hip bones, trying to extract his Indian essence. Later he is forced to copulate with a woman he calls “Mother.”

These stories are highly stylized—sometimes more painting than writing, more to be contemplated than understood. Sometimes style seems the only object. The repeated enumeration of things whose count doesn't matter is an example. Another example: the repetition of puzzling phrases, which break into the narrative like someone shouting in the apartment next door.

Mystifying motifs appear in the action, too. For instance, there are a great many occasions of copious weeping. One stops trying to understand these as signs of actual emotion, and starts to see them more abstractly, as the characteristic outcroppings of a literary landscape.

Sherman Alexie is an eloquent stylist, often heightening reality as he ennobles language: “On that morning, the sun rose and bloomed like blood in a glass syringe. The entire Spokane Indian Reservation and all of its people and places were clean and scrubbed. The Spokane River rose up from its bed like a man who had been healed. … The blades of grass, the narrow pine needles, and the stalks of roadside wheat were as sharp and bright as surgical tools.”

But at other times he becomes the victim of his own gifts. “The plane rose higher and higher above the earth. At that height, I knew gravity was a story passed from one generation of undiscovered birds to the next. At that height, oxygen was a sacrament.” This is language of lyrical beauty. But passing through these gilded passages, one finds himself again outside.

Gleefully exploded are the icons of the white West. John Wayne, for instance, is quoted as saying, “I try to embrace the feminine in myself,” and “Gender is mostly a social construction.” Unfortunately, a flip manner attaches even to what matters most: e.g., “He wondered if his heart was broken.” Broken hearts deserve better.

Alexie, the author of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, is a widely honored writer possessed of grand material. But in these stories, his considerable talent is too often dissipated in poses, gestures and winks.